Edward Snowden grilled by comedian John Oliver

Comedian John Oliver has sat down with National Security Agency contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden on HBO’s Last Week Tonight for a wide-ranging interview that was funny and, at times, surprisingly tense.

Oliver, who flew to Moscow to conduct the interview, grilled Snowden on the leaked documents.

“How many of those documents have you actually read?” Oliver asked Snowden.

“I have evaluated all of the documents that are in the archive,” the 31-year-old former CIA systems administrator said. “I do understand what I turned over.”

“There’s a difference between understanding what’s in the documents and reading what’s in the documents,” Oliver countered.

“Because when you’re handing over thousands of NSA documents, the last thing you’d want to do is read them,” he said.

The comedian and former Daily Show correspondent said Snowden’s actions led to the disclosure of sensitive information beyond the NSA’s controversial government surveillance program, including the revelation that the US was monitoring al-Qaida in northern Iraq.

“The New York Times took a slide, didn’t redact it properly, and in the end it was possible for people to see that something was being used in Mosul on al-Qaeda,” Oliver said.