Director of National Intelligence James Clapper didn’t intend to...
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper didn’t intend to lie to Congress, his office’s General Counsel Robert Litt said Friday evening. Litt wrote a letter to The New York Times, also posted to ODNI’s Tumblr page (http://bit.ly/1a1tIHA), responding to the…
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paper’s recent editorial on ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. Clapper had told Congress earlier this year that the U.S. government didn’t collect content on Americans at large, which many have said was a lie, given revelations since then about the government’s bulk metadata collection program. During a hearing, Clapper “was surprised by the question and focused his mind on the collection of the content of Americans’ communications,” Litt said. “In that context, his answer was and is accurate. When we pointed out Mr. Clapper’s mistake to him, he was surprised and distressed.” The record could not be corrected due to how classified the program was, Litt said. “This incident shows the difficulty of discussing classified information in an unclassified setting and the danger of inferring a person’s state of mind from extemporaneous answers given under pressure.”