Disgraced deep state perjurer James Clapper has seen better days. Falling from his prestigious post of Director of National Intelligence during the Obama regime to a CNN hack spewing deceptions as he attempts to stay out of prison, Clapper is watching as his anti-constitutional legacy at the NSA is wiped away completely.
The very first NSA program we revealed from Snowden documents – the mass domestic spying program of Americans' phone records, which James Clapper lied about & Obama insisted was vital to national security – has been shut down https://t.co/H91zvOcVMk
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 5, 2019
CNET fills in the details of the NSA curtailing its phone spying program:
“The National Security Agency has quietly discontinued a controversial program put in place after the September 11 terrorist attacks that collected and analyzed millions of Americans’ domestic calls and texts, according to a senior Republican congressional aide.
The NSA hasn’t used the system in months, and the Trump administration might not seek to renew its legal authority, Luke Murray, the national security adviser for House minority leader Kevin McCarty (R-Calif.), said in a podcast Saturday.
Under a controversial national security policy put in place by the Patriot Act in 2001, the NSA had been collecting large amounts of metadata, the digital information that accompanies electronic communications. That information included what phone numbers were on the call, when the call was placed and how long it lasted, which was then saved in a database.”
While we can never take the NSA at their word, this public declaration is good news. It shows that the mainstream consensus is turning against dragnet ubiquitous spying. It also shows that the Trump administration is re-evaluating processes within the federal bureaucracy that may not serve a purpose and stop them. This is what the swamp being drained looks like.
Meanwhile, Clapper is on TV making the rounds with a new set of excuses about why he committed perjury in a public hearing regarding this now shuttered spying program.
“[T]he original thought behind this, and this program was put in place as a direct result of 9/11, and the point was to be able to track quickly a foreign communicant talking to somebody in this country who may have been plotting a terrorist plot, and was put in place during the Bush administration for that reason. I always regarded it as kind of a safeguard or insurance policy so that if the need came up you’d have this to refer to,” Clapper said to John Berman on an edition of CNN’s “New Day.”
“As far as the comment, the allegation about my lying: I didn’t lie, I made a big mistake and I just simply didn’t understand what I was being asked about,” Clapper added. “I thought of another surveillance program, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when I was being asked about Section 215 of the Patriot Act at the time. I just didn’t understand that.”
Read Clapper’s body language as he lied to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) while being grilled over five years ago in the fall out of Edward Snowden’s leaks scandal. Does this look like a man who is trying to tell the truth?
Clapper’s lies won’t be enough to save him from accountability. He committed perjury, conspired in secret to enact Big Brother, and waged total war against the 4th Amendment of the Constitution. He must be held accountable for those crimes against liberty in order for justice to be restored in the former land of the free.
