For Edward Jay Epstein’s book How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft to have value—for it to be worth reading, not just an object intelligence hard-liners might display on their shelves as a sign of their contempt for Snowden—the facts he selects to anchor and discipline his scenario-building cannot be flimsy or cherry-picked to fit his preexisting beliefs. This is important because he clearly decided early that everything pointed in the direction of the Snowden saga being a foreign espionage plot. It is unfortunate that Epstein builds his imagined scenarios upon allegations that may not be real facts.