



One of the biggest failures of the United States Congress, IMHO, has been the refusal to hold Executive Branch officials accountable when they lie to Congress on vital matters of national security. And no case angers me more than that of James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence under President Barack Obama, who held a series of high-level intelligence positions during his long career as an Air Force officer.

Clapper, during his tenure as DNI, lied to Congress when directly asked if the intelligence community was spying on millions of innocent American citizens. His lies were exposed with the release of the Edward Snowden documents. While several individual Members of Congress called for his resignation and a few even dared to demand his prosecution for contempt of Congress, nothing happened.

More recently, Clapper again lied to Congress, in claiming that the intelligence community findings about Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections were compiled by all 17 member agencies. In later testimony in May 2017, he belatedly admitted that the report was compiled by the FBI, the CIA and the NSA, and that the authors had been hand-picked to conduct the study. According to Robert Parry in Consortium News, one of the FBI agents who participated in the study was Peter Strzok, a Trump-hater and Hillary Clinton partisan who was fired by Robert Mueller last July after an investigation by the Department of Justice Inspector General revealed his biases.

I recall comments over the years by Col. Lang about his personal experiences with Clapper while at the DIA in the early 1990s. I am interested in Col. Lang's and others' comments and observations.