This isn't helping his legal troubles at all.
I don't think Snowden is in a position to worry about a trial. Whistleblowers are activists by definition. Whether or not he took a position to expose wrong doing doesn't really matter much, although the media is spinning it that way. For example, if you work for an agency and you know they are doing something wrong, and you accept a new position that helps you expose it, you are still working as a whistleblower in a very classical sense. There is no qualification that you can only expose wrongdoing at your current job. Journalists have infiltrated prisons and industries in the same manner to expose wrongdoing.
Dude needs to learn how to be quiet. I don't get these people, if it is about exposing data then what is the point of making themselves the center of attention? It allows everyone to start talking about the person (Snowden and Assange) and ignore the actual problems.
Assange (says he) thought that by being the very public face of Wikeleaks he would attract all the heat himself and keep everyone else relatively safe; he described it as being a lightning rod. It doesn't look like it's worked out that way, but there's no reason to think he didn't believe what he said. No idea what Snowden was thinking, other than that the US would figure out it was him eventually and maybe the support he'd get would be worth letting it happen sooner rather than later. Birgitta Jonsdottir and Wikileaks aside, all the help he's getting is obviously just about scoring points against the States, and that wouldn't happen if he wasn't getting so much attention. Edit: fixed missing words.