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.”
“My statement about inadvertent collection could only apply when we incidentally collect on U.S. persons who are communicating with non-U.S. persons overseas. The statement makes no sense in the context of Section 215, which he was asking about, and only makes sense in the context of Section 702, which is what I was thinking about,” Clapper added.
During a 2013 hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wyden asked Clapper if the National Security Agency collected “any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans,” referring to “dossiers” that the agency had allegedly collected on that number of people.
Clapper replied, “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.”
Months later, documents leaked by former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the NSA was operating a bulk telephonic metadata collection program, and claimed authority to do so under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. After discovering the program, Congress allowed it to expire on Nov. 29 of last year.
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“Even if I had been on the same page with Sen. Wyden, I would have still been in an awkward position because the existence of the program that he was asking about was classified,” Clapper wrote in his post on Wednesday. “We were in an unclassified hearing, and I thought we were talking about an unclassified program. So, yes, I made a mistake. But I did not lie. There’s a big difference.”
