On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, host David Gregory asked Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the story of the NSA’s massive spying program, whether he should be charged with a crime if he had helped source Edward Snowden.

“To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?” Gregory asked at the end of their conversation.

Greenwald replied that it was “pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies,” and that there was no evidence to support Gregory’s claim that he had “aided” Snowden.

Gregory responded by saying there are questions as to whether Greenwald is a journalist “with regard to what you’re doing,” but he didn’t say what those questions were. He added that he was merely posing a question, not “embracing anything.”

After the exchange, Greenwald tweeted: “Who needs the government to try to criminalize journalism when you have David Gregory to do it?” Others wondered whether Gregory would have asked the same of Neil Sheehan, the New York Times writer who published the Pentagon Papers in the early 1970s.

The Guardian journalist was on the show to discuss his source’s flight from Hong Kong to Moscow on Sunday morning.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

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