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26 officials, senior members of the Obama Administration, and members of the oversight committees of Congress do not view Snowden as a hero or even an authentic whistle-blower. Instead they see him as a betrayer of secrets who, acting willfully brought damage to the United States and benefits to its adversaries. The holders of this darker view of Snowden base it on classified reports of the full extent of the theft of classified data. Those officials reckon that only handful of the tens of thousands of documents he stole involved domestic surveillance, and these few documents served as a cover for a much larger theft. Admiral Michael Rogers, who replaced General Alexander as head of the NSA in January 2014, said that March at a public forum at Princeton University. “Edward Snowden is not the "whistleblower" some have labeled him to be.” He further explained to Congress: “Snowden stole from the United States government a large amount of classified information, a small portion of which is germane to his apparent central argument regarding NSA and privacy issues.” Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went even further. He testified to the House Armed Services Committee on March 6, 2014, after estimating that the Snowden breach could cost the military “billions” to repair, added that "The vast majority of the electronic documents that Snowden exfiltrated from our highest levels of security had nothing to do with exposing government oversight of domestic activities." He based this assessment on then still-secret Defense Intelligence Agency’s report on the breach. Although he did not reveal the full extent of the damage even in his classified testimony to Congress in 2013, the classified DIA report showed that Snowden took "over 900,000" military files from the Department of Defense (DoD) in addition to the NSA files he had taken.. The Defense Department loss in terms of the number of files stolen actually exceeded the loss, in sheer numbers, of NSA documents. Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, the DIA director, who directed the DIA secret study, testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the breach “has caused grave damage to our national security.” To be sure, this was not the first time that the cryptological branches of the military had been compromised. The spy ring of John Walker had provided thousands of the Navy’s reports on breaking Russian ciphers to the KGB during the Cold War era, for example. But the Snowden breach exposing military sources was an order of magnitude greater than any past breach. The CIA’s assessment was no less grim. Michael J. Morell, the deputy director of the CIA in 2013, who, after Snowden’s breach, was appointed by President Obama to the task force to review the NSA’s intelligence breach and its consequences for national security, wrote that Snowden’s action went beyond taking the handful of documents, such as the FISA order, “that addressed the privacy issue.” Instead, as Morell put it, “he backed up a virtual tractor trailer and emptied a warehouse full of documents—the vast majority of which he could not possibly have read and few of which he would likely understand—T[and] and he delivered the documents to a variety of news organizations and God knows who else.” _—As a result, Morell concluded “Snowden’s disclosures will go down in history as the greatest compromise of classified information ever.” General Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA at the time, came to a very similar assessment, asserting that Snowden did “the greatest damage to our combined nations’ intelligence systems that we have ever suffered.” To be sure, it is to be expected that military intelligence officers HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020178