"Whoever embezzles, steals, purloins, or knowingly converts to his use or the use of another, or without authority, sells, conveys or disposes of any record, voucher, money, or thing of value of the United States or of any department or agency thereof, or any property made or being made under contract for the United States or any department or agency thereof; ..."
It's definitely possible to imagine a situation in which Snowden "knowingly ... sells ... any record ... or thing of value of the United States" to Russia, namely a copy of the information he had available to him while working for the NSA.
I'm not sure how courts have interpreted "record ... or thing", and whether (for example) a copy of a page from an internal government wiki would count, but let's assume that digital information is a "thing" and that copies of it are still "of the United States".
I'll further grant, for the sake of argument, that the US government has secret evidence that such a selling did take place (perhaps witnessed by a double agent working at the Kremlin, who could be called upon to give a witness statement at a trial held in secret), although I don't actually believe such selling occurred.
My main point, though, was that I don't know of any court interpreting "steals" in a statute to mean "making an unauthorized copy of" or "leaking". You're right, though, that there are other laws that cover what Snowden did.
Is there some reason you would know this? Intellectual property and classified information are things. You can steal them.
So-called "intellectual property" is neither intellectual nor property. If I randomly mash the keyboard for a few minutes, the resulting jumble of letters can have its redistribution restricted by copyright law, despite not requiring any intellectual feat to produce. It is also not property, since I cannot own ideas that exist within your head or the sound waves that emanate from your mouth when you whistle a tune I wrote.
> You can steal them.
No you can't. The legal definition of "stealing" requires that the perpetrator takes someone else's property (which an idea isn't) without permission with the intent to deprive them of the property. You can't deprive someone of an idea by making more copies of that idea, much less is that the intent behind copying, so the label of "stealing" is completely inapplicable.
If, for example, some hacker found out the President is a spy for China they’d suppress it but if a CIA agent breaks the law and leaks it’s fine?
A hacker doesn't even know what the information is before the attack and is likely an adversary who will use any information to damage, regardless of public interest.
And as as the Twitter files show and the Democratic rep (Ro Khanna) highlighted, they were banning a “news article” about hacked materials, no hacked materials themselves. Are we prepared to even ban the media from talking about hacked materials?
Access is not the same as authorization.