Edward Snowden said he has informed government officials that he will return to the U.S. if guaranteed a fair trial.
The former intelligence analyst, who leaked reams of classified NSA documents in 2013, told the New Hampshire Liberty Forum in a Google Hangout on Saturday, “I’ve told the government I would return if they would guarantee a fair trial where I can make a public interest defense of why this was done and allow a jury to decide.”
The former CIA analyst and NSA contractor was referring to the thousands of classified documents he turned over to Wikileaks that revealed information on U.S. surveillance programs, both domestic and international.
The forum, a presentation of the Free State Project, which is a movement to relocate 20,000 like-minded Americans to New Hampshire in pursuit of a libertarian state, invited Snowden to speak as part of its four-day summit. Snowden addressed attendees from Russia, where he’s been exiled since 2013.
According to WMUR, media were not invited to record the 45-minute session.
The disclosure comes a day after the announcement that a release date for the big-screen biopic of Snowden, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, has again been postponed. “Snowden,” Oliver Stone‘s adaptation of two books based on its namesake, has been pushed back from May 13 to September 16.