Though he acknowledged that Edward Snowden did indeed perform a “public service” by starting a national conversation about government surveillance, former Attorney General Eric Holder still insists that the NSA whistleblower should be prosecuted for supposedly “harming American interests.”

“We can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made,” Holder told David Axelrod in an interview on CNN‘s “The Axe Files,” which was published on Monday.

Nonetheless, Holder, who oversaw the U.S. Department of Justice in 2013 when Snowden’s revelations were first made public, said that leaking government surveillance practices to media outlets was “inappropriate and illegal” and claimed that as a result “agents were put at risk, relationships with other countries were harmed, our ability to keep the American people safe was compromised.”

Thus, Holder argued that Snowden, who has spent the last few years exiled in Russia, should return to the U.S. to face prosecution.