US hints at Edward Snowden plea bargain to allow return from Russia.

[frazzled]

19. But he must plead guilty first

The Guardian is such a saucy puppy. They had the ability to report this more explicitly, but apparently chose to curtail their quotes. Actually, there's not really much new here at all:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Thursday that the United States was willing to discuss how the criminal case against Edward J. Snowden would be handled, but only if Mr. Snowden pleaded guilty first.

Mr. Holder, speaking at a question-and-answer event at the University of Virginia, did not specify the guilty pleas the Justice Department would expect before it would open talks with Mr. Snowden’s lawyers. And the attorney general reiterated that the United States was not willing to offer clemency to Mr. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has leaked documents that American officials have said threaten national security.

“Instead,” Mr. Holder said in response to a question at the university’s Miller Center, “were he coming back to the U.S. to enter a plea, we would engage with his lawyers.”

...

I absolutely think the tide has changed for Snowden,” Jesselyn Radack, a legal adviser to Mr. Snowden and a lawyer with the Government Accountability Project, said last month. “All of these things taken together counsel in favor of some sort of amnesty or pardon.”

Mr. Holder ruled out that possibility on Thursday. “We’ve always indicated that the notion of clemency isn’t something that we were willing to consider,” he said, adding that any discussions with Mr. Snowden’s lawyers would be the “same with any defendant who wanted to enter a plea of guilty.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/us/politics/us-willing-to-hold-talks-if-snowden-pleads-guilty.html?hp&_r=0

I doubt these are the conditions under which Mr. Snowden would agree to come back. Unless of course, Russia is even worse than we thought. The message of this was, plead guilty to a certain number of charges (which would mean some definite prison time, probably) and we'll talk about dropping some other charges.