So now Edward Snowden's Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena, a government approved lawyer close to intelligence and law enforcement, is telling the Russian media that his client did not stay at the Russian consulate in Hong Kong.

We had just heard from multiple sources cited by Kommersant that in fact he did, and spent his 30th birthday there.  I recall looking attentively at those sources:

The first source is said to be "a source close to Snowden" or literally "in Snowden's circle" or even "in Snowden's entourage".

По информации источника "Ъ" в окружении экс-сотрудника ЦРУ и АНБ Эдварда Сноудена

'So who the hell is that? Sarah Harrison talks to Kommersant about what her charge is doing?

Or is it these mysterious "Americans" who were described as taking care of him by Kucherena in the Russian media when he left the airport? Is that John Robles? Why don't any US newspapers go after this story in Moscow?! I am mystified as to why we have not seen a single report coming out of Moscow about Snowden — no efforts to get at his lawyer, no efforts to find information by trawling through the pro-Kremlin ex-pat community. Didn't anybody trail him from the airport?

So which is it?

It doesn't seem to be just the technical issue of whether or not Snowden stayed overnight; now Kucherena is saying he wasn't there at all:

"Edward told me that he never visited any diplomatic missions and that all this is inaccurate. He never had any talks with our diplomats while in Hong Kong," Anatoly Kucherena told the Kommersant newspaper.

But the Kommersant story cited multiple sources, the first close to him and the second a government official. What's up? At least we know it's not Kucherena himself if he is now spinning it in a different direction. Kommersant even cited a Western source in the State Dept who claimed Putin had invited Snowden.

Or maybe not? If this story was citing only American sources in Moscow you might wonder if it were planted by US intelligence to cast aspersion on Snowden as really being in the tank with the KGB's successors all the time. But these are Russian sources in the Russian media. As we know, the Russian intelligence community is described as split over Snowden — but we know this from the disreputable provocateur Israel Shamir, WikiLeaks entrepreneur for Eastern Europe.

It's important, again, to remember the timeline: first came Putin's invitation to apply for asylum — June 11th — then days later came the US opening of a criminal case, discussion of extradition, and then finally the pulling of Snowden's passport on June 20th. So let's not get caught up in this fake Kremlin narrative that Snowden was "pushed" to Putin — when Putin was luring him June 11th, two days after Glenn Greenwald published his first piece based on Snowden's leaks, and nine days before the passport was pulled.

To the extent that the USG can control the narrative on this awful disaster, where closing the barn door after the horse has bolted does little good, they have to show that Snowden was doing the Russians' bidding, or in with the Russians way before it seemed he was.

So that's why you get Joshua Foust strenuously banging the drum on the Russian intelligence angle.

The only problem with this is that he is selective in how he covers this, and misleading to the point of deliberate distortion. He keeps calling Snowden naive and misguided, as if setting the stage not to blame him too much. He implies that Russian intelligence has long been at work to lure Snowden, thereby putting the blame largely on Putin, but he also puts in WikiLeaks somewhere, although never really spelling out anything, just reiterating the obvious about Assange's show on RT and Shamir. He doesn't even think to ask: but what kind of visa does Sarah Harrison have?

The whole circus is about to wind up again when Lonnie Snowden, Edward's father, comes to Moscow.

Once again I have to point out that it's hard to know who to believe about any of this when Edward himself never appears, even on Twitter, and never says anything, except through his Russian lawyer Kucherena, through Sarah Harrison or through Julian Assange. Meanwhile, Kucherena swears he hasn't leaked anything new — so those items like the black budget still coming out were leaked presumably at the very beginning in the whole batch to Greenwald and Poitras.

Greenwald is insisting, after the incident with British intelligence grabbing his husband's electronics at Heathrow, that only he and Poitras control these documents. Well, I don't think they can be trusted on this question.

Given that the developers of Tor in the Navy and elsewhere are now admitting that 80% of communications of Tor can be de-anonymized within six months, we have to wonder, if Jacob Appelbaum was using Tor to help Snowden whether it didn't take Miranda's detention for the Russians or others to get the materials, they may have pulled it long ago from the exit nodes on Tor.

Amy Knight has a piece on Snowden posted at the New York Review of Books, in which she tells us the tidbit that Snowden was offered a choice of two lawyers by border control officials, and he picked Kucherena.