Little did Director of National Intelligence James Clapper know that when he and two of his Obama administration colleagues sat down to discuss the terror threat with ABC’s Diane Sawyer earlier this month that his appearance would be the source of controversy. As has been widely reported, Clapper did not know what Sawyer was talking about when she asked a seemingly innocuous question concerning terror-related arrests in the UK just hours earlier. Clapper’s defenders, including inside the administration, have argued that he is a busy man, focused on many diverse threats, and so he wasn’t briefed when he should have been.

That isn’t good enough. The intelligence bureaucracy has to be better than this. Clapper should have known about the arrests as soon as they went down, if not beforehand. In fact, the more we learn about what the plotters were up to, as well as the efforts to stop them, the more troubling the DNI’s ignorance becomes.