Posted on 07/02/2013 2:02:32 PM PDT by jazusamo
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has apologized for a “clearly erroneous” statement he made to Congress over the National Security Agency’s surveillance activity.
In a letter to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) released publicly on Tuesday, Clapper said he was mistaken when he told Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) that the United States did not collect data on millions of Americans.
“My response was clearly erroneous — for which I apologize,” Clapper wrote in the letter dated June 21.
“While my staff acknowledged the error to Senator Wyden’s staff soon after the hearing, I can now openly correct it because the existence of the metadata collection program has been declassified,” Clapper said.
Clapper's statements at the March 12 Senate hearing have received enormous scrutiny ever since news stories revealed the NSA's telephone and Internet surveillance programs last month.
Clapper directly contradicted those stories in his comments on March 12.
"Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Wyden asked the intelligence director at the hearing.
"No, sir,” Clapper replied.
"There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly," he added.
Members of Congress, particularly Wyden, had criticized Clapper since the NSA programs became public, and he has been under pressure to offer an apology. His letter was posted on the DNI website on Tuesday.
Clapper said he was writing in part because of the "charged rhetoric and heated controversy" over his response, so he could "set the record straight."
Clapper wrote to Feinstein that he has “thought long and hard to re-create what went through my mind at the time.”
He said that he was faced with the challenge of giving an unclassified answer about intelligence activities, and he said he “simply didn’t think of Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” which contains provisions on the metadata collection detailed in the Guardian stories.
”Instead, my answer focused on the collection of the content of communications,’ he wrote, saying he was thinking about Section 702 of the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows the NSA to collect information on people reasonably believed to be outside the United States.
“That is why I added a comment about ‘inadvertent’ collection of U.S. person information, because that is what happens under Section 702 even though it is targeted at foreigners.”
Our Federal Government has turned into living spyware that we have no virus protection against.
I guess the perjury goes away if he apologizes.
yes it does under the Obama Admin ,it’s all lies
Oh yeah? Well at least Clapper didn’t possibly use STERIODS!
Our government has become one big fail.
They’ll tell us it wasn’t a “lie”, lie...just a less than truthful version of the truth
A documented liar to Congress cannot run this post
(except to continue helping al Qaeda, of course).
And I'm sorry we're going to have to send you to prison.
Isn't there a way to communicate to the senator that he is not at liberty to disclose that information.
JAIL...
So the Director of National Intelligence expects us to believe that he was completely unaware of the largest domestic spying program in human history, and his statement to that effect to Congress was a simple error.
Riiiiiiight.
Good thing John Boehner is a man of action who won’t be made a fool of.....
Yes, but I wouldn’t say I’m sorry.
As a former (several rungs down the chain) legal advisor of then-General Clapper, I can say he rarely listened to his lawyers then, either. He’s gotta be really scared for his political future at this point - that’s the only thing that seems to motivate him.
If Clapper had an ounce of integrity, he would resign, but we all know he doesn’t have a gram of integrity.
He should simply have said, I’m not going to discuss our methods in an open forum.
Isn't there a way to communicate to the senator that he is not at liberty to disclose that information.
There sure is, he could have offered to meet in closed session.
Guess what happens if I lie to the owner of the company I work for.
Which is NOT, by the way, a breach of attorney-client privilege.
At least he didn’t use the sloppy excuse.
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