In addition to Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, the new Greenwald-Omidya venture has hired Dan Froomkin and Liliana Segura, both well-known journalists with an independent turn of mind.

As Erik Wemple writes, the statement accompanying the hiring of Segura that states that “She is on the board of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty and the Applied Research Center, a U.S. racial justice think tank” indicates one major way in which this venture is going to be different from the mainstream media outlets in the US, by shedding that bogus sense of objectivity. He says “Such a sentence would never appear in the hiring memo of a mainstream U.S. media outlet, in part because it would likely force Segura to resign from any such organizations prior to becoming an employee.”

Meanwhile, Edward Snowden has met with a German member of parliament from the Green party and has told him that he may be willing to go to Germany to testify on the phone hacking of the chancellor if sufficient safety guarantees are given that he will not be handed over to the US.

Such an event is unlikely because the German government will be reluctant to agree to provide him with asylum. But his offer puts them in an awkward position because if they refuse, it would show that they value subservience to the US more than getting to the bottom of this big story about which they have professed to be so angry. They will probably suggest sending someone to Russia to interview him.