As the presidential transition continues, reports that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has submitted his letter of resignation arrived on Thursday, and while a tweet from the Office of the DNI confirms it, people are pointing out that Clapper is getting out before the Trump Administration takes over.
From YouTube, viewers can watch the James Clapper resignation announcement from NBC.
A few tweets have come with the news.
US intelligence chief #Clapper resigns – his lying to #Congress about #NSA #survellane provoked #Snowden leaks. https://t.co/AlIoXU1NaR — denise mourges (@denisemourges) November 17, 2016
The following DNI tweet seems to spin the resignation, however.
As required of all appointed Administration officials, DNI Clapper has signed a letter of resignation effective at noon on Jan 20, 2017. — Office of the DNI (@ODNIgov) November 17, 2016
Quoted in one account, reported by Ken Dilanian and Corky Siemaszko over at NBC, Intelligence Director Clapper made a statement about his own sense that “people have been feeling uncertain” about the transition of power in D.C.
“I know a lot of people have been feeling uncertain about what will happen with this Presidential transition. There has been a lot of catastrophizing, if I can use that term, in the 24-hour news cycle and social media. So, I’m here with a message: It will be okay.”
Clapper told lawmakers that it “felt pretty good” to resign, adding, “I have 64 days left and I’d have a pretty hard time with my wife going past that.”
Michael Nunez of Gizmodo relates the point that Clapper’s own testimony to Congress was “later proven to be false when The Guardian published the first of the global surveillance documents leaked by Edward Snowden.”
People may recall instances, such as the accusation from NSA-whistleblower-in-exile Edward Snowden, that Clapper “lied,” per this transcript from Norddeutscher Rundfunk online.
Regarding Snowden “secretly” collecting “thousands of confidential documents,” Snowden answered as follows.
“I would say sort of the breaking point is seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. There’s no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions. Seeing that really meant for me there was no going back.”
Snowden added that he had a creeping thought that “no one else was going to do this. The public had a right to know about these programs.”
“The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the public, but neither of these things we were allowed to discuss, we were allowed no, even the wider body of our elected representatives were prohibited from knowing or discussing these programmes and that’s a dangerous thing. The only review we had was from a secret court, the FISA Court, which is a sort of rubber stamp authority[.]”
Also tweeting about the news of James Clapper resigning, Senator Rand Paul had very few words himself in a response on Twitter. But it seems full of drama anyway as America transitions into a new Administration and priorities.
Farewell, James Clapper https://t.co/GbLrt3kaoM — Dr. Rand Paul (@RandPaul) November 17, 2016
Spying and war may have taken a toll on millions who see James Clapper’s resignation as a good thing. Or, as Snowden said in his NDR interview, “[w]hen you are on the inside and you go into work everyday and you sit down at the desk and you realise the power you have – you can wire tap the President of the United States, you can wire tap a Federal Judge and if you do it carefully no one will ever know because the only way the NSA discovers abuses are from self reporting,” perhaps Clapper saw the writing on the proverbial wall.
[Featured Image by Juliet Linderman/AP Images]
