Lawrence O’Donnell Calls Snowden’s Christmas Speech ‘Absurdly, Wildly Overblown’

On the same day that journalist Glenn Greenwald suggested that his defense of NSA source Edward Snowden is no different than MSNBC’s defense of President Barack Obama, that network’s Lawrence O’Donnell took Snowden to task for making “provably untrue” statements during his alternative Christmas message.

“Every time he speaks, every time, he will say things that are absurdly, wildly overblown,” O’Donnell said. “He says that the government is, quote, ‘watching everything we do.’ That is of course impossible. No one is watching everything we do. That capacity doesn’t exist.” After listing off more of Snowden’s ominous warnings about the surveillance state, O’Donnell said, “I find it odd that every time he speaks he says provably untrue things like this.”

O’Donnell’s guest Joy Reid, who shared her own criticisms of Greenwald on Twitter earlier in the day, agreed with O’Donnell assessment, noting that Snowden’s revelations “were not new if you read The New York Times.” What Snowden did was add “made up, horror story ideas that came from Edward Snowden’s own mind.”

Finally, alluding to Snowden’s suggestion that we are living in an “Orwellian” society, Reid added, “to say that this is worse than 1984 means that you never read 1984.”

Watch video below, via MSNBC:

[photo via screengrab]

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