James Clapper
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James Clapper was Director of National Intelligence under President Obama. In John Kiriakou's account he is less a subject in his own right than a worked example, of what happens to a senior official who lies to Congress, and of what goes wrong when a career military officer is put in charge of intelligence.

The drone testimony

Kiriakou recounts Clapper testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee near the end of Obama's presidency, pressed repeatedly by Senator Rand Paul on whether the president could legally use a drone to kill someone in the United States who had never been formally accused of a crime; after "hemming and hawing," the answer was "yes." He uses it to argue that Barack Obama was "far, far deadlier" than George W. Bush, killing ten times as many people by drone.

Lying to Congress without consequence

When Clapper told Ron Wyden "no", the intelligence community was not spying on Americans, that one-word answer was later shown to be a false statement, and a felony. Clapper defended it as "the least incorrect answer" he could think of at the time; Wyden simply accepted it, and no one was charged. Kiriakou's objection extends to Wyden, who he says knew and kept the secret on the intelligence community's behalf from the public he works for, leaving it to Edward Snowden to expose.

The episode did not pass unnoticed at the time, and Kiriakou has recited the reaction as evidence that the machinery for accountability exists and simply was not used: Clapper was caught lying to Congress about how much metadata was being kept on American citizens, twenty-six senators co-signed a letter accusing him of perjury, one senator demanded his resignation, and the House leadership of the intelligence committee was "in open revolt over his lies." He raises this in support of a broader argument that perjury and contempt of Congress are historically the only two charges that have ever caught CIA officers, going back to the 1970s, and therefore the route a special prosecutor and a grand jury should take. Against that record he asks why Clapper's later assurances should be believed at all, the "double whammy" that the intelligence community had not surveilled the president and that there was no evidence the Trump campaign was in touch with the Russians, calling it an attempt to close the barn door after the horses have escaped.

Kiriakou has also pointed to the contrast in treatment, noting that a president who prosecuted whistleblowers under the Espionage Act remained fond of Michael Hayden and of Clapper, "who lied to Congress."

The dossier, and the break with Brennan

Kiriakou's closest reading of Clapper's character comes from the weeks after the 2016 election, when Clapper and John Brennan both spoke publicly about the Christopher Steele dossier. Clapper, he says, "tries very hard to walk this very fine political line and he's just simply not good at it." Clapper's habit is not to respond to attacks; on this issue he responded several times, one of the attacks having come from Donald Trump himself. That two sitting intelligence chiefs would take sides publicly at all, confirming or denying rather than saying no comment, or declining even to acknowledge the document existed, Kiriakou calls unprecedented.

The two men then diverged. Clapper retreated, expressing profound dismay at the leaks, saying the intelligence community had not produced the material and did not believe it had leaked it, and closing with what Kiriakou characterises as an entirely different message from Brennan's: "we stand ready to serve you." Brennan's motive, in Kiriakou's reading, was personal, a deep-seated hatred of Trump he attributes to Trump having criticised him publicly, and a calculation that Russian intervention would be the hammer to hit Trump with.

Why Kiriakou opposes generals in the job

The split is the evidence for Kiriakou's general rule. "This is why I oppose military officers in these senior positions." Clapper is a career general, and "he has spent his entire adult life saluting and saying yes sir", where what the job requires is someone who will say "Mr. President, that's a terrible idea." By this measure Clapper "can't stand up to a president," whereas Brennan is "a little bit more ornery ... rougher and tougher." Kiriakou attributes Clapper's departure to the same trait: challenging a president, or even a president-elect, in public is not in his nature.

He makes a related structural point about the office itself: the whole purpose of creating the DNI, in his account, was to put an adult in charge of George Tenet after the post-9/11 failures, but the position's authority follows its budget, and the largest intelligence budgets, the NSA, the DIA, Army, Navy and Air Force intelligence, sit under the Secretary of Defense rather than the DNI. The result, he says, is another layer of bureaucracy that constrains only the CIA.

Afterwards: the network chair

Clapper also appears in Kiriakou's account of how the CIA shapes American opinion without needing Operation Mockingbird, which has been illegal since 1975. The third mechanism he lists is the destination of retiring chiefs: "Clapper is on CNN, Brennan is on MSNBC, Hoffman is on Fox. They're on every one of these networks." The consequence, in his phrasing, is that the viewer gets the CIA company line on every network, "right, left, and center. It doesn't matter which one you're watching."

See also

- John Brennan
- Rand Paul Eric Holder
- Anwar al-Awlaki
- Operation Mockingbird
- Ron Wyden
