141 served the public good. The government might not be able to contest his claim without further revealing NSA sources. Under these circumstances, it might be induced to agree to a plea bargain for Snowden. Changing the narrative would also help enhance his public image as a whistle- blower, Whatever the reasoning that led to it, Snowden’s new narrative was that he had destroyed all the documents he had in his possession before coming to Moscow and had no access to any NSA documents, not even those that he had distributed to journalists. Snowden reinforced this narrative in almost in a series f interviews arranged by Wizner. In December 2013, he met with Barton Gellman of the Washington Post. It was his first face-to- face meeting with a journalist since he had arrived in Russia in June. To advance his narrative , Snowden turned on his laptop to Gellman and, as if proving his point, said to him “there’s nothing on it... my hard drive is completely blank.” That his computer had no files stored on it actually meant very little. The files could have been transferred to another device, or, as was discussed earlier, to a server in the cloud. Gellman probed further by asking the precise whereabouts of the files, but, as he reported, Snowden declined to answer that question. All that he would say was that he was “confident he did not expose them to Chinese intelligence in Hong Kong.” Since that answer did not nail down the issue, Wizner arranged for Vanity Fair, which was preparing an article on Snowden, to submit questions. In his reply to them, Snowden wrote s that he destroyed all his files in Hong Kong because he didn’t want to risk bringing them to Russia. He expanded on this claim in three more interviews arranged by Wizner. These interviews were with three journalists who themselves had opposed NSA surveillance: James Bamford writing for Wired magazine, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian and Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation. He also gave