Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said on Wednesday that he did not wittingly lie to Congress in 2013 when he responded to a question from Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., about bulk metadata collection, and instead insisted that he made a mistake.
“When Sen. Wyden asked me the question I simply didn’t think of the business records telephony metadata, at the time stored by [the National Security Agency] and governed by Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” Clapper wrote in a post on his Tumblr account, responding to a question submitted by a reader. “Instead, I thought of content — given his reference to ‘dossiers’ — which, in my mind, meant Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which governs collection on non-U.S. persons overseas.”
