Edward Snowden was not debriefed by Russian intelligence personnel.
That is what he told Brian Williams.
We learned this from the specific language that Snowden used answering Brian Williams's questions. It seems odd, at first, as you would think that the Russians would want to get what they could from him. There is no harm in trying.
But instead of saying that he had deflected official inquiries, Snowden went out of his way to say that there was no such approach. There is no evidence, nothing but RWNJ paranoia that leads to belief that Snowden lied.
So what does makes sense? What fits both history and opportunity?
It's not like the Russians are dummies at recruiting Americans:
1. Services have been provided to Soviet Union/Russian intelligence operations steadily over decades.
2. Every significant Federal operation has been infiltrated. The stuff that gets classified as secrets has been stolen.
3. Big list for spies: Robert Hanssen, Edward Howard, Robert Soblen, Aldrich Ames, Harold Nicholson, Ronald Pelton, David Boone, Richard Miller, Earl Pitts, Christopher Boyce, and many dozens of others who got caught, plus others who did not get caught.
Those people did espionage. Mostly they were bribed. What problems would a Russian spy face at scraping files off NSA servers?
4. The NSA system had no document-level security protections. When Snowden went looking, there was no use of the Trusted Oracle document vault security application. (NSA bought it; didn't use it.)
5. Anyone with root access on a regional server could traverse the NSA network and copy virtually unlimited numbers of documents. Bandwidth was the physical limit.
6. Indexes were not protected.
7. The documents, themselves, were not encrypted.
All in all, if the Russians hadn't already cleaned out NSA and analyzed their new toys, they would have asked Snowden for help.
What makes sense: the Russians already had everything Snowden could possibly have copied.
Russia's big pay-out: avoid Snowden and pray that NSA stays brain dead for its own computer security.
NBC is slow getting out a full transcript. A transcript of the whole uneditted interview -- that'll stay a "maybe" for now.
And ultimately, who beside the Russians and Snowden got hooks in and copied NSA files ??? What is out there that could damage us individually?
To Hell with worrying that the U.S. Army might lose some advantage, fighting the Red Army. That war's not going to happen. The TBTF banks getting insider information so they can manipulate stocks? So they can blackmail people in governments worldwide? You betcha.