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36 actually happened. To him, Snowden’s timeline, as established by the government’s investigators, did not match up to Snowden’s story line. “Something is not right,” Alexander said in an interview. What was wrong with Snowden's account proceeded from unresolved inconsistencies in both the timing and nature of the theft. For one thing, Snowden had made the claim to journalists, four months after he was in Russia, that he had turned over all the documents he took from the NSA’s compartments to journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald in Hong Kong. However, on August 18, 2013, the investigators had the opportunity to examine the files that Snowden had actually given Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong. This discovery came when David Miranda, Greenwald’s romantic partner, was detained at Heathrow Airport by British Authorities under Schedule Seven of Britain’s Terrorism Act. At the time, as British intelligence presumably knew, Miranda was acting as a courier for Greenwald and Poitras. According to Greenwald’s account, Snowden had given both him and Poitras identical copies of the NSA documents in Hong Kong. When Greenwald returned home to Rio de Janeiro, he found his copy was corrupted. But Poitras still had her digital copy of whatever stolen documents that Snowden had distributed to them. So Greenwald dispatched Miranda from Rio to Berlin to get a copy of Poitras’ thumb dive. On the return trip, Miranda’s plane stopped at Heathrow and British authorities temporarily detained him and temporarily took the thumb drive from him. Poitras had written out the password for Greenwald, and Miranda kept it with the thumb drive. The British quietly copied the contents and shared them with the NSA. As a result, the NSA discovered that Snowden had only given Poitras and Snowden some 58,000 documents. By any measure, it was only a tiny fraction of Snowden’s total haul. The damage assessment team under Ledgett determined that some of these documents had been edited out of much larger documents that the NSA logs showed that he had copied. Snowden had evidently selected for the journalist’s only parts of the lengthy documents. For example, only scattered fragments of the 36,000 page “road map” file were among the material on the thumb drive. By the count of both the NSA team and the Defense Department team almost one million documents were unaccounted for. If Snowden had not given these missing files to Poitras and Greenwald, the issue of what had happened to them became a critical missing piece in the puzzle. Adding another layer to the mystery of the missing documents, the NSA investigation found that the chronology of the theft of documents did not support Snowden’s claim to journalists that he had only been seeking whistle-blowing documents. Most of the documents he first took did not concern the domestic activities of the NSA. It was only towards the end of the theft that he copied documents that would qualify as whistle-blowing. In fact, the now-famous FISA court order to Verizon that was the basis of the initial Guardian expose was only issued by the FISA court on April 27, 2013. The other main whistle-blowing document he revealed, the PowerPoint presentation about PRISM, a joint NSA-FBI-CIA Internet surveillance program, that was the basis of the Washington Post expose, was also only issued in April 2013. Yet Snowden had been HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020188