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James Clapper Claimed He Didn’t Lie, But Misunderstood A Question. Democrat Senator Destroys Him.

   DailyWire.com

On Tuesday, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said on CNN that he didn’t lie during his congressional testimony in 2013, but that he misunderstood the question that was asked.

The Intercept’s Glen Greenwald has reported earlier in the week that the National Security Agency program revealed by Edward Snowden was finally shut down.

“The very first NSA program we revealed from Snowden documents – the mass domestic spying program of Americans’ phone records, which James Clapper lied about & Obama insisted was vital to national security – has been shut down,” Greenwald tweeted.

The lie Greenwald was referring to was something Clapper said during his testimony in 2013. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked Clapper if the NSA collects “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”

Clapper responded: “no sir. Not wittingly.”

This was clearly untrue, as Snowden’s leaked documents showed the agency had collected millions of cell phone records from Verizon customers, and had specifically requested the records of Americans and not the records of foreigners, according to Forbes. Clapper later apologized for his “clearly erroneous” testimony. Now that the program has been scrapped, CNN’s John Berman asked Clapper for a reaction to Greenwald’s claim that he lied.

Clapper defended himself by claiming he misunderstood the question back in 2013, according to a clip uploaded to Mediaite.

“Well, the original thought behind this, and this program was put in place as a direct result of 9/11, the point was to be able to track quickly a foreign communicant talking to somebody in this country who may have been plotting a terrorist plot and was put in place during the Bush Administration for that reason,” Clapper told Berman. “I always regarded it as kind of a safeguard or insurance policy so that if the need came up you would have this to refer to.”

Clapper continued:

As far as the comment, the allegation about my lying, I didn’t lie, I made a big mistake and I just simply didn’t understand what I was being asked about. I thought of another surveillance program, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when I was being asked about Section 215 of the Patriot Act at the time, I just didn’t understand that.

Wyden, the senator who asked Clapper the question back in 2013, took to Twitter to shut down Clapper’s claims.

“James Clapper needs to stop making excuses for lying to the American people about mass surveillance. To be clear: I sent him the question in advance. I asked him to correct the record afterward. He chose to let the lie stand,” Wyden tweeted.

“When intelligence leaders mislead the public about surveillance, they fuel the cynicism and mistrust of government that lets wannabe authoritarians gain power,” he added in another tweet.

Clapper also tried to defend the program from reports that it never helped capture a terrorist.

“Well, that’s true, and I think probably at the time contemporaneously back in 2013 or so when all this broke that we may have oversold it a bit because, you know, we were hard-pressed to point out to a specific case in point,” Clapper said. “What this was was just trying to capitalize on the lesson learned from 9/11. I will say that — and I’ve said this publicly many times before, that what this did prove was the need for the intelligence community to have been more transparent.”

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