Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden broke ranks with his colleagues on Thursday, slamming the nation’s top intelligence official in the wake of his retirement announcement.
Wyden, a Democrat who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Director of National Intelligence James Clapper “repeatedly misled” Americans during his tenure leading the intelligence community.
“During Director Clapper’s tenure, senior intelligence officials engaged in a deception spree regarding mass surveillance. Top officials, officials who reported to Director Clapper, repeatedly misled the American people and even lied to them,” Wyden said in a statement.
It was Wyden who in 2013 asked Clapper during a hearing of the Intelligence Committee whether the NSA collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper famously replied, “Not wittingly.”
Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden later credited the exchange with inspiring him to leave the agency as a whistleblower that year, exposing thousands of classified documents that contradicted Clapper’s testimony.
“I wouldn’t have been doing my job if I hadn’t asked that question,” Wyden said Thursday. “My staff and I spent weeks preparing it, and I had my staff send him the question in advance so that he would be prepared to answer it.
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“Director Clapper famously gave an untrue answer to that question. So I had my intelligence staffer call his office afterward and ask them to correct the record. The director’s office refused to correct the record. Regardless of what was going through the director’s head when he testified, failing to correct the record was a deliberate decision to lie to the American people about what their government was doing. And within a few months, of course, the truth came out,” Wyden said.
“I urge the next administration to take a different approach and reject the use of secret law that has been all too common in recent years,” he added. “In America, the truth always comes out eventually, and when it does, Americans have proven time and again they will be outraged at the government agencies, officials and politicians who allow secret and expansive interpretations of the law.”
Clapper has served as the director of national intelligence since 2010 as the fourth official to lead the agency since its 2005 creation. He announced Thursday that he had submitted the letter of resignation required of all outgoing administration officials, and will leave the agency effective Jan. 20.
