Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper tried to explain on CNN Sunday why the Trump campaign wasn’t warned about Russian meddling efforts.

WATCH:

During an interview with Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Clapper seemed to argue that the Russian threat “had [not] reached the point” where the FBI would alert the campaign, but apparently had reached the point where the FBI would send in an informant.

“The first thing is just to determine what was going on,” Clapper said. “If there wasn’t a concern about the Russians…perhaps no reason to do that. You know, the FBI has rules and protocols for when they decide to do something like that and I don’t think that at that point it had reached the point where it would be appropriate to engage the head of the campaign or the nominee.”

Clapper also denied any knowledge of the operation, explaining that it would not be “appropriate” for the DNI to know the identities of any informants working with the FBI.

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