Washington, September 20 (RHC)-- The Washington Post's editorial board is calling for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to face criminal charges.  In an editorial published over the weekend, the Post called on Snowden to return to the United States to face charges under the Espionage Act, or to bargain for "a measure of criminal responsibility for his excesses." 

In response to the Post editorial, journalist Glenn Greenwald with The Intercept noted that three of the four media outlets which received and published large numbers of secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden -- The Guardian, The New York Times and The Intercept – have called for the U.S. Government to allow the NSA whistleblower to return to the U.S. with no charges. 

Greenwald said that is the normal course for a newspaper, which owes its sources duties of protection, and which -- by virtue of accepting the source’s materials and then publishing them -- implicitly declares the source’s information to be in the public interest. 

But, Glenn Greenwald notes, the editorial position of The Washington Post places it in the position of being "the first-ever paper to explicitly editorialize for the criminal prosecution of its own paper’s source -- one on whose back the paper won and eagerly accepted a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service."