Yes, James Clapper Perjured Himself Before Congress, and Should Be Both Fired and Prosecuted

Fred Kaplan, who tends to be a font of conventional wisdom, is calling for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to be fired:

If President Obama really does welcome a debate about the scope of the U.S. surveillance program, a good first step would be to fire Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Back at an open congressional hearing on March 12, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper replied, “No sir … not wittingly.” As we all now know, he was lying.

We also now know that Clapper knew he was lying. In an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that aired this past Sunday, Clapper was asked why he answered Wyden the way he did. He replied:

“I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked [a] ‘when are you going to … stop beating your wife’ kind of question, which is … not answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying, ‘No.’ ”

Let’s parse this passage. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wyden had been briefed on the top-secret-plus programs that we now all know about. That is, he knew that he was putting Clapper in a box; He knew that the true answer to his question was “Yes,” but he also knew that Clapper would have a hard time saying so without making headlines.

There were actually some non-answer answers he could have given that didn't rise to the level of lying to Congress, saying something like, "No one is perfect, but we do our best not to infringe on the privacy of the American public," but he just perjured himself, and he did so because he simply did not did not care about telling the truth under oath.

FWIW, is obliquely saying the Clapper lied through his teeth as well:

Ron Wyden, a Democratic member of the Senate intelligence committee, revealed that he had given Clapper, the director of national intelligence, a day’s advance notice of a question about the extent of government surveillance at a congressional hearing in March.

Clapper said earlier this week that he had misunderstood the question. When asked directly by Wyden in March whether the NSA was collecting any kind of data on “millions” of Americans, Clapper replied “no” and “not wittingly” - a claim undermined by the Guardian’s disclosures about NSA collection of millions of Americans’ phone records. Wyden also disclosed that he had given Clapper an opportunity in private to revise his answer, after the session.

“One of the most important responsibilities a senator has is oversight of the intelligence community. This job cannot be done responsibly if senators aren’t getting straight answers to direct questions,” Wyden said in a Tuesday statement.

(emphasis mine)

Note that this makes this even worse, because Clapper did not just lie off the cuff. He was given 24 hours to come up with an appropriate answer, and then he was given the opportunity to revise his answer, and he just lied, because he knew that there would be absolutely no consequences for this.

With Barack Obama in the White House, and Eric Holder as Attorney General, he is probably right, but the statute of limitations is 5 years, so a new AG could file charges between January 2017 and May of 2018.

It won't happen, but I can dream.