Edward Snowden on surveillance: what the evidence says · JRE #1368
SUBJECT: SURVEILLANCE
The short answer
Snowden claims President Bush personally warned the New York Times that running the NSA warrantless-wiretapping story before the 2004 election would put 'blood on your hands,' and that this threat is why the paper held the story until December 2005. The core claim is well supported.
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
the New York Times said, we won't run the story. Because the president just said, if you run this story a month before the election, that's a very tight margin if you recall, you'll have blood on your hands.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The core claim is well supported. The New York Times had James Risen and Eric Lichtblau's NSA warrantless-wiretapping story ready in fall 2004, before that year's election, but executive editor Bill Keller held it after White House officials -- and Bush personally, in a meeting with Keller -- warned that publishing could cost lives, with Newsweek's account specifying the phrasing that there would be 'blood on your hands' if another attack occurred. NPR's May 2014 coverage of the PBS Frontline documentary 'United States of Secrets' corroborates the broader sequence: administration officials briefed editors against running the story, Keller was brought to the White House, and he held it until December 2005 -- a decision NPR also ties to Snowden's own later distrust of the Times. The NPR source does not itself repeat the exact 'blood on your hands' wording; that specific phrase is sourced to Newsweek's reporting. Taken together, the sources support Snowden's account of the timeline, the pre-election context, and the substance of the threat, even though no primary transcript of the Bush-Keller conversation was available to confirm the precise wording verbatim.