When introducing James Clapper as his Director of National Intelligence in 2010, President Obama specifically justified the appointment by saying Clapper is someone who “understands the importance of working with our partners in Congress (and) not merely to appear when summoned, but to keep Congress informed.” At the time, it seemed like a wholly uncontroversial statement – it was simply a president making a sacrosanct promise to keep the legislative branch informed, with the insinuation that previous administrations hadn’t.

Three years later, of course, James Clapper is now the embodiment of perjury before Congress. Indeed, when you couple Edward Snowden’s disclosures with the video of Clapper’s Senate testimony denying that the National Security Administration collects “any type of data on millions (of Americans),” Clapper has become American history’s most explicit and verifiable example of an executive branch deliberately lying to the legislative branch that is supposed to be overseeing it.

Incredibly (or, alas, maybe not so incredibly anymore) despite the president’s original explicit promises about Clapper, transparency and Congress, the White House is nonetheless responding to this humiliating situation by proudly expressing its full support for Clapper. Meanwhile, as of today’s announcement by U.S. Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), the demands for Clapper’s resignation are finally being aired on Capitol Hill.

Those demands are obviously warranted not just because Clapper so clearly lied, but also because his was no ordinary spontaneous fib. On the contrary, according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Clapper was given a full day’s advance notice that the question was coming, and yet he nonetheless still opted to lie. That’s not a spur-of-the-moment fib – that’s a calculated, willful attempt to mislead those who have a constitutional responsibility to perform oversight.

Seeking to move the national discussion away from the NSA’s potential crimes , many politicians and pundits are, not surprisingly, continuing to insist that Snowden revealed only legal programs and is therefore not a whistleblower. They are, in other words, trying to ignore the fact that whether or not the NSA programs are illegal ( and they very well may be ) Snowden at minimum revealed a case of potential criminal perjury – and an extremely serious one at that. As Wyden says, “One of the most important responsibilities a senator has is oversight of the intelligence community (and) this job cannot be done responsibly if senators aren’t getting straight answers to direct questions.”