Think Progress reports that Schumer tears into the Russian government for "aiding" the NSA leaker, Edward Snowden, after allowing Snowden passage on a Rusian airline on his first leg of a journey which Snowden hopes will land him in a country that will offer him asylum from being prosecuted in the U.S. for espionage.
SCHUMER: What’s infuriating here is Prime Minister Putin of Russia aiding and abetting Snowden’s escape. The bottom line is very simple. Allies are supposed to treat each other in decent ways, and Putin always seems almost eager to put a finger in the eye of the United States, whether it is Syria, Iran, and now, of course, with Snowden. That’s not how allies should treat one another, and I think it will have serious consequences for the United States-Russia relationship. [...]Emphasis mine.
CROWLEY: And just could you tell me a couple of what those — what serious consequences?
SCHUMER: Well, who knows? We have all kinds of relationships with Russia, and in some ways it works out pretty well. We’re trying to mutually reduce the number of nuclear arms that each country has. But there are many different kinds of relationships that are political, economic. And I don’t think we can shrug our shoulders and say this is how Putin is.
Now let's look at something the New York Times reported earlier:
Mr. Snowden is reportedly carrying four laptop computers with a cornucopia of American intelligence documents that he downloaded to a thumb drive this spring while working in Hawaii for the National Security Agency as an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton. The Guardian newspaper of Britain has already disclosed a week ago that Mr. Snowden provided the newspaper with documents showing that during a conference in London in 2009, the United States was able to access the communications of Dmitri A. Medvedev, then the Russian president and now the prime minister — a disclosure that will almost certainly cause Russia to review its codes and other procedures for top leaders.
Again, emphasis mine.
Countries spy on each other, accusations run rampant, but very seldom are documents made public proving it, and once those documents became public, it was almost guaranteed that Russia, if asked, would "aid and abet" Snowden to flee prosecution.
The revelation of those documents might have been shrugged off had it not humiliated the Russian government, who in turn, just basically flipped Obama off and said "heh, tit for tat."
The fact that Schumer is acting so surprised and indignant, is either political theater or he truly is crazier than ever.
