This story originally appeared in Salon May 26, 2018

James Clapper on Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, torture and "the knowability of truth"

Obama's intelligence chief on the Steele dossier (mostly true), the Trump danger and whether he lied to Congress

Andrew O'Hehir

May 26, 2018 4:00pm (UTC)

James Clapper wants you to know that he did not lie to Congress. He also wants you to know that he believes a massive campaign of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign got Donald Trump elected, and that American democracy and American society are in grave peril.

After sitting across a table from Barack Obama's former director of national intelligence while he talked about those things (and others), I believe that Clapper is telling the truth as he understands it. That is always a complicated concept, to be sure, when we're dealing with someone who has spent his entire adult life in the spy trade.

What do we mean by the truth, and how do we know it when we see it? We have a problem with that in America right now, as Clapper more than most people is aware. It's an issue he specifically discussed in our Salon Talks conversation this week in New York, and one he discusses at length in his just-published memoir, "Facts and Fears: Hard Truths From a Life in Intelligence." Whether Clapper perceives that his profession and his career have contributed to the crisis of truth - whether he perceives, in other words, that the question of whether he lied to Congress and whether Russian subterfuge and lies actually decided a presidential election are intimately connected - I cannot say.

Probably not. Clapper built his career in intelligence on a reputation as a straight shooter, a longtime Air Force officer and NSA analyst who would give the higher-ups the hard facts, even if they didn't particularly want to hear them. In our conversation, he readily agreed with my suggestion that the intelligence trade rests on the premise that the truth exists and can be discovered, even if there are many missteps along the way. He seemed amused when I said that our current dilemma, when no one in America seems to believe in the same version of reality, recalled the ancient philosophical paradox of Plato's cave. I don't think his vision of spy-craft allows much room for stuff like that.

Although Clapper was not perceived as a member of Obama's innermost circle, he lasted more than six years in a Cabinet-level position, longer than any other major national security official of that administration. That relationship is interesting on a number of levels: Clapper had worked under both Presidents Bush and (as he admits) was implicated in the false intelligence assessment that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Obama promoted him anyway, and stuck by him even after Clapper was accused of perjuring himself on Capitol Hill in 2013, an embarrassing misstep, at best, that would have led most presidents to pull the plug. (We'll get back to that.)

At first glance the two men could hardly be more different, and perhaps that was the point. Obama had enough intellectual depth and enough ability to ponder shades of gray for three presidents, and liked to surround himself with advisers who offered a contrast. I would speculate he valued Clapper for his gruff, plain-spoken Middle American demeanor, which was likely in the same vein as that of Obama's Kansas grandparents.

Clapper's assessment that the Russian-sponsored onslaught of fake news and Facebook ads and Twitter trolls and all the rest of it actually altered the 2016 election outcome - which he is careful to state as his personal opinion - has made headlines and fueled social-media furor all week long. He repeated versions of that in numerous interviews (including ours) but the clearest statement came in his PBS interview with Judy Woodruff:

[G]iven the massive effort the Russians made, and the number of citizens that they touched, and the variety and the multidimensional aspects of what they did to influence opinion and affect the election, and given the fact that it turned on less than 80,000 votes in three states, to me, it just exceeds logic and credulity that they didn't affect the election, and it's my belief they actually turned it.

Considering Clapper's relationship with Obama, it's reasonable to read this as the former president attacking the legitimacy of his successor, at least by proxy-which is no doubt why President Trump has responded to Clapper with such fury. It also represents a major departure from intelligence-community orthodoxy, which still holds that there's no way to know for sure whether the Russians affected the election results, or how much.

As I've already suggested, there's a problem here: Clapper is a flawed messenger, and the U.S. intelligence community is a flawed instrument. There is no escape from the flawed epistemology of the Trump era, if you'll forgive the five-dollar term. In plain English: Nothing is certain, everything is ambiguous and we all pick and choose what we want to believe. Mainstream liberals who despise Trump and yearn to drive him from office hold up Clapper as a man of unquestioned authority, integrity and patriotism - but no such qualities are available these days.

For critics like Scott Shackford of Reason on the right and Jeremy Scahill of the Intercept on the left - neither of whom can be accused of blindly supporting Trump - James Clapper is essentially just another beard for the machineries of power, a longtime leader of the deep state eager to deny that the deep state even exists. For my part, I experienced Clapper quite differently, and I don't think a simplistic caricature of him as hero or villain can capture his ambiguous role in this drama. There was nothing evasive or mendacious in his manner during our conversation, and as I've said I believe he was being as honest as he knows how to be. Whether that means everything he said was true, or entirely satisfactory, is quite another matter.

Clapper was certainly not thrilled when I brought up his infamous Capitol Hill exchange with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., in March 2013, when he testified that the NSA did not knowingly or wittingly collect data on American citizens. Several months later Edward Snowden revealed that, at best, that was a wildly misleading statement; Clapper recanted, apologized and has insisted ever since that he misunderstood the context of the question. You can read his answer and judge for yourself.

Clapper nodded along grimly as I listed a litany of historical events that veterans of U.S. intelligence don't relish talking about: the 1953 coup that overthrew a democratic government in Iran (and continues to create blowback today), the 1961 assassination of Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba, the 1973 military coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende in Chile, and so on. He wasn't personally involved in any of those, but after the camera was turned off, he brought up another one I hadn't dwelt on. "The WMD thing in Iraq?" he said. "My fingerprints were all over that one. That was one of our biggest mistakes."

For a man who must know many secrets the rest of us should be grateful we will never learn, there is almost something innocent about James Clapper. There is certainly something wistful. I told him that "Facts and Fears" struck me as a melancholy book, a lament for a vanished idea of America as a land of common decency and bipartisan comity, a land of shared ideals, shared aspirations and shared truths. He did not disagree. Whether that America actually existed, and whether it can be recaptured, are not questions we can expect a retired spymaster to answer.

This transcript has been extensively edited for length and clarity. You can watch my entire conversation with James Clapper embedded below.

In conversation with James Clapper

The former director of national intelligence on his new memoir, President Trump and the problem of truth.

Director Clapper, we are clearly in an unusual situation, where the president of the United States has called for the Justice Department to investigate itself -- or at least to investigate the FBI for alleged political corruption. You've expressed the view that this is an unprecedented and dangerous situation.

Well, I'm a big believer in the traditional norms and standards of this country, and one of which is an independent Department of Justice and independent FBI. I think it's very worrisome when the president injects himself in terms of directing an investigation, particularly one that pertains to an investigation on him. I think this is one of a number of assaults on our institutions that I find very bothersome.

Meaning assaults by President Trump.

Yes.

How do you view the people who are in charge at the agencies that you used to run, or that you know about: Gina Haspel at CIA, Mike Rogers at NSA, Chris Wray at the FBI, Dan Coats, who has your old job as director of national intelligence? Are they competent professionals?

Well, absolutely. I do think, though, that all of them have perhaps an additional burden that wouldn't have traditionally happened to them because of the requirement for them to provide top cover for their organizations and the people in them to continue to do the mission of intelligence.

Meaning that they have to protect their people from political interference by the administration?

That's one aspect of it. And to ensure that can carry on the tradition of speaking truth to power, even if on occasion the power doesn't listen to the truth. They need to make sure that that's what the workforce serves up.

When you talk about these assaults on the institutions of the country, I detect a certain thread of melancholy or wistfulness, both in this book and the things you say on CNN. There's a running theme that you are concerned about the state of America and the future of America. Is that fair?

I think it is. One of the concerns -- and thanks for the question because it's an important one -- is just the erosion of the idea of truth and, if I can use the term, the knowability of truth. I think increasingly the Russians exploit this to a T, casting doubt on whether truth is knowable and the whole business with "alternative facts." I think the loss or the erosion of the notion of truth as a beacon, which has always been pivotal in this country, is a very serious concern.

Well, your business, the intelligence business, is predicated on the assumption that there are facts that we can know, even if they are difficult to find or unpleasant. They exist, and we can find them, right?

Well, yes. Although there are times when you're operating with an incomplete set of facts. Then it's up, traditionally, to making your best assessment based on that facts you have. But everything should be factually based. Well, sometimes you make mistakes about that, but that primary turn of seeking truth for the best of your ability is what's important, and I worry about the erosion of that principle.

You write about that very specifically in the context of the Russia investigation. If I have my facts correct, as early as May 2016, you expressed the view that the Russians were trying to interfere with the election campaign. Correct?

That's right.

And by the fall of that year, it was clear to you that there was an "unprecedented," "aggressive," and "multi-faceted" campaign -- those are your words -- using all kinds of different methods: propaganda, social media, fake news stories, advertising money and all of that. This is a question you probably can't answer: How much more do you know about that Russian campaign than is in the book? Are there other details you can't talk about?

Well, the only thing I don't talk about in the book, particularly, are certain sources and methods, which are traditionally in intelligence known as the crown jewels that we always try to protect. The intelligence community assessment, for example, that we published on Jan. 6, 2017, and briefed President-elect Trump on at Trump Tower -- we put out an unclassified version based on some highly sensitive sources and methods and techniques and tradecraft that obviously we don't want to expose. The important thing was to get the results of it out. What is not reflected in the book obviously is those underlying facts: The sources and methods, techniques and tradecraft that we used to derive that.

You've also said that while you were director of national intelligence, you didn't have any personal knowledge of FBI Director James Comey's counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. Can you explain how that worked?

Right. The policy I followed both with Director [Robert] Mueller when he was at FBI before, and then again certainly with Jim Comey is that I left it to them to decide when, whether and what to tell me about a counterintelligence investigation, particularly if it involved U.S. persons. We are very sensitive about that. Unless, in their judgment there was some reason I needed to know about a counterintelligence investigations or a counterterrorist investigation -- I would normally be informed about those.

But there is an important function that the FBI uniquely performs. They are a bridge between the law enforcement and intelligence community. They straddle both worlds. They have a traditional law enforcement mission, which was altered profoundly as a result of 9/11. But they straddle both worlds and that's a delicate mission to carry out, which I think they do with great distinction.

So in a formal sense, no, I didn't know about [that investigation]. I surmised there was one underway, but I was not formally briefed on one. Actually, when Director Comey testified before the House Intelligence Committee on the 20th of March of 2017, it was actually then I knew -- but I wasn't particularly surprised.

Now, about these suggestions that the president is making that there was a political motivation behind the investigation into his campaign. You've made clear you find that ludicrous on the merits, but in fairness you can't speak to that as a factual question, right?

Well, I mean that's obviously his interpretation or his spin. This gets into the "deep state" business. From my perspective, what I was most concerned about and still am -- one of the reasons, one of the motivations for writing the book -- was the profound threat that Russia poses. This disinformation operation that they waged during the campaigns and since, and will continue, because it's a very cost-effective way of undermining our very system and that's what they're after.

Do we now know the scale and scope of their operation? Or not yet?

I think we have a reasonably good idea, and a lot of that has emerged over the course of the Mueller investigation. No, I don't think we know everything. He and his team obviously know far more than what's out there. Reflective of that is the indictment that was made public in February of the 13 Russians and their Internet Research Agency which from my standpoint was very gratifying. That was something of a bookend for our intelligence community assessment [of January 2017] that we wrote pretty quickly, in the space of about a month.

I suspect there's more of that out there that we haven't heard yet and certainly, when I left, I considered that we had scratched the surface on a lot of these things, particularly, the multi-faceted and pervasive use of social media by the Russians. We understood that, but not to the depth and detail that we have since learned.

You have clearly endorsed the intelligence community's assessment that, one of the goals of Russian interference was to aid Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton. You have also suggested, however, that perhaps that wasn't their primary concern.

Well - they had a... their rules evolved overtime. Their first objective was simply just to sow doubt, discord and discontent in this country, and I think they succeeded very well because we're a ripe target for that.

Secondly, starting with the strong personal animus that [Vladimir] Putin has for the Clintons and specifically for Secretary Clinton, was to do everything they could to denigrate and marginalize her. As I recount in the book, there are some striking parallels in terms of themes and things that the Trump campaign said and did and things that the Russians said and did. I'm not suggesting collusion, I don't have any proof of that. But just striking parallelism.

Thirdly, once Mr. Trump emerged as a serious contender and particularly when he became the Republican nominee, the Russians stood up and took notice because they didn't take him seriously, initially, either - like many people in this country. Well, then they did and then they began to actively support him because, well, he wasn't Hillary Clinton. As a businessman, he'd been to Russia and they thought they could deal with him. Importantly, the Russians didn't think he'd beat them up about the human rights abuses. They disfavored her and favored him almost by definition.

I can virtually guarantee that you're not going to give me a very specific answer to this question. Do you have personal views on how much of the infamous Steele dossier is true and how much is not true?

Well, some of what was in the dossier ... first of all, I need to make an important point here. We did not use the dossier as a source for the intelligence community assessment, that's point one. The dossier is not classified or an intelligence document. It's actually a collection of 17 separate memos. Some of what was in the dossier was actually corroborated -- but separately -- in our intelligence community assessment, from other sources that we were confident in. The salacious parts, no. That's never been corroborated. It would appear to me that as time has gone on more and more of it has been corroborated, but I can't actually give you a percentage.

Some of it was valid, and those memos were analogous to something that we do do in the intelligence community, which is "first-instance reporting." Sometimes those reports are right on the money and other times they're not. The collection of memos in the dossier are sort of like that.

Our only purpose, at least my only purpose for briefing the president-elect [on the dossier] in the "no good deed goes unpunished" department was to let him know it was out there and Jim Comey, the then-director of FBI, was concerned about the Russians. For them, there's an art and science to what they call "Kompromat," compromising material, whether it's actual or contrived. It doesn't matter because if they can they'll use it for leverage. That's what Director Comey wanted to warn the president-elect about and we tried to do it on as discreet a basis as possible. That's why at the end we winnowed down [that meeting] to just Director Comey and the president-elect.

I want to turn back to this issue that you talked about earlier, with the loss of a shared sense of facts and truth, where we almost get into issues of philosophy, like Plato's cave or something. Was that actually important to the Russians? This idea of undermining Americans' confidence in facts?

Absolutely. Absolutely. This is a classic. It goes back to Soviet era. It's almost in their genes to do this. There's a fundamental resentment of the United States starting with Vladimir Putin. He held Hillary Clinton responsible for prompting what he thought was another call for revolution to overturn him. The Panama Papers, the [Olympic] doping scandal, all these revelations, he deeply resented those -- and of course, the United States represents everything that Russia isn't. Free and open media, independent judiciary. He's got a history of disposing of political opponents in his country. He's very much an autocrat. You need to remember he's a former KGB officer -

That's right. I mean, it strikes me as potentially dangerous to see too much continuity between the Soviet era and the current era in Russia. But is that an area where you see some continuity? Because under the Soviet state, they very much took the position that "truth is whatever we say it is."

Well, there was a period there after the collapse of the Soviet Union where it was a change, and of course from Putin's standpoint a weakness. Putin characterized the demise of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century. I think, frankly, he is more of a throwback to the czarist era than the Soviet era. His vision of Great Russia, a very expensive definition. Who's a Russian? Anybody who speaks Russian by definition is a Russian citizen, that sort of thing.

Let's get back to the specific allegation that President Trump and his supporters have clearly made some headway with. I mean the suggestion that people in your world, meaning the intelligence community, might favor someone like Secretary Clinton -- a political insider who knew the ropes and could speak the language -- over an outsider from the business world who really didn't know anything. On the surface that's not an absurd allegation.

On the surface, it's not. I mean, people in the intelligence committee are intelligent people and citizens of the country, so they have their own political views. But, professionally, you are supposed to keep that separate, your own private political views. In fact, there's a law about it, the Hatch Act, about how engaged you can become in political activities, whether you're military or civilian. I think going in there is great respect and reverence for the office of the presidency, and particularly in his or her role as commander in chief. Instinctively and institutionally, there is respect for that. Obviously, people have their own preferences: There are people in the intelligence community who are supporters of Mr. Trump. But all that needs to be kept separate, and I think generally has been despite what he thinks.

The intelligence committee faced a "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" proposition here. I've often thought if President Obama had not tasked us in the intelligence community to do our assessment of what might have happened -- if you think about it, that was sort of a catalyst for a sequence of events that are still unfolding. I'm not sure on our own we would have done that, particularly as we were nearing the end [of the administration]. I was for my part counting the days till I was done.

But President Obama charged us to do that and that too has been some of the alleged political activity. It was not. He just wanted all the intelligence reporting put together in one place so it could be handed off to the next administration and to the Congress. That was his whole intent. He also wanted us to publish an unclassified version, which we did, and the findings of that unclassified version had exactly the same wording as the highly classified version. It's just that we couldn't, for obvious reasons, include the substantiating evidence. I don't think it was a political act, but it became politicized just by the fact that we did it. Again, our focus was on the adversary here: Russia and what Russia was doing to try and undermine us.

Well, your profession is the subject of a lot of mistrust. Isn't that part of the story here? And you can't break this down strictly on partisan lines. Today we suddenly have liberal Democrats protecting the intelligence agencies and conservative Republicans attacking them, it's like a role reversal. You're well aware that you have an optics problem and a P.R. problem that goes back for decades. We could discuss what happened in Iran in 1953, or what happened in Guatemala shortly after that. Or the death of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1961, or the Chilean military coup of 1973. More recently we had the massive intelligence failure in Iraq, and the black site prisons and waterboarding. How much has that history shaped a mistrust of your profession?

Well, I think it has a profound impact. I mean, yes, history is replete with what people came to regard ex post facto as abuses. I was around during the war in Southeast Asia, I did two tours there and so I went through all the Vietnam aftermath and the trauma that Vietnam caused this country. The result of the Church and Pike investigations, which resulted in the establishment of the two oversight committees in 1976.

The crux of the issue, though, and what leads to these incidents, at least to my mind, is that unlike the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Interior or the Department of Commerce, which in everything they do is largely transparent and open, it's not so with the the intelligence community because the nature of what we do is secret. If it were exposed, it would be completely ineffective. We'd be compromised. Because of that and the aura of mystery that surrounds the intelligence community, there is a natural, almost instinctive concern -- a suspicion of deep dark things, conspiratorial things, going on that people don't know about.

One aspect of this is that it places an extra burden on the members who served on those two [intelligence] committees, in the House and the Senate - because they have to act as surrogates for everyone else who cannot be exposed to what we do. They have to be the vanguard, the guards, to ensure what the intelligence community is doing is ethical, moral and legal. Yeah, the intelligence community has been asked to do not nice things by presidents who felt that there was a need for that. Then afterwards, sometimes we change our moral standards and what was once OK now is not, which is a kind of a professional risk or hazard that those who serve in the intelligence community have. But I think there will always be somewhat of this aura of suspicion.

One of the things that I learned, and I recount this in the book, is about the aftermath of Edward Snowden. I could almost understand what he did if his revelations were limited only to so-called domestic surveillance. But he exposed so much else and compromised so much else that had absolutely nothing to do with so-called domestic intelligence. He compromised a lot of our capabilities and if you're a taxpayer you're going to be paying, we all are, to recover from the damage that he caused.

What I thought the lesson here was to me, personally -- because it was costly for me too -- was the need for more transparency and to try to declassify as much as we can to give as much confidence as we can to the American public that this is not a rogue elephant. It's not out of control. There are rules and procedures for what we do and we're oversighted by all three branches of the government. But I think for some, we'll never satisfy the curiosity or the innate need to be assured that what we're doing is legal and appropriate.

At the end of my six and half years, I would tell you, I actually get very mixed signals from the American public about what it is they expect from the intelligence community and law enforcement. Whenever we have an untoward incident, they have the inevitable post-event critique. I can think of many cases -- the Fort Hood shooting or the Boston Marathon, to cite two specific cases -- where the post-event critique was that the intelligence community or law enforcement should have been more intrusive. You should have been reading that officer's emails more. You should have been surveying those two brothers. Then other times, I don't know, we are too intrusive. As I say, mixed messages.

Do you feel that, generally speaking, our system does correct itself? That we learn the truth about what happened with these controversial or perhaps destructive actions and try to learn from them?

Well, maybe. Maybe not. I mean, we've learned a lot about the governance of covert action which is foreign policy by secret or clandestine means. These are normally directed and approved by the president and scrutinized very heavily in great detail by the two oversight committees, because this is another case where for obvious reasons it has to remain classified. But in the end, the intelligence community is responding to policymakers -- policymaker No. 1 in this case -- and had been put in the position of doing things that were later regarded as inappropriate. The use of so-called EITs by the CIA -

Enhanced interrogation techniques. Such as waterboarding.

Enhanced interrogation techniques, to use the formal term of art. People who engaged in that believed they were doing what was appropriate and what was needed and was approved by the president, and sanctioned by the Department of Justice -- and although you'd have a hard time finding anybody in the Congress to say this today, approved in many cases. Not just approved but embraced and encouraged. Retroactively, after the fact we decide that with a higher moral standard, this is a bad thing to do.

To me, this is not unlike after Pearl Harbor, when we relocated and interned Americans of Japanese descent. It was an egregious thing to do, an injustice. But given the atmosphere at that time and the genuine fear and paranoia that existed after the Pearl Harbor attack, it's understandable if not excusable. Some other thing with the EITs. I had returned to the intelligence community and headed another agency, what's now the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. I started there two days after 9/11, and I recall very distinctly the paranoia, the fear that we're going to have more attacks. The pressure that was put on all the intelligence community and others, especially CIA and FBI. I think it's important when we make these judgements with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, to try to remember the contemporaneous atmosphere.

On the subject of congressional oversight, I know there might be one or two minutes of your life you'd like to take back. Of course I'm referring to your testimony on Capitol Hill in 2013, when Sen. Ron Wyden asked you whether the NSA collected data on Americans -

Well, what's never shown in the clip is the entire question that he asked. This is at the end of a two-and-a-half-hour hearing on the worldwide threat. Sen. Wyden asked the question rather euphemistically and used the word "dossier," now famous for a different reason. What that suggested to me was content, not telephone logs. What he was really asking about was the metadata storage program, under the provisions of Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

I didn't even think of that. I was not thinking about what he was asking about. I was thinking about another program, that which is governed by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act, as it's awkwardly called, which governs the collection of [data from] non-U.S. persons overseas. The whole exchange took less than a minute. My comment about it being inadvertent makes absolutely no sense in the context of Section 215 on the metadata. It only makes sense in the context of Section 702. Moreover, I'd been testifying for 20 or 25 years on the Hill, maybe dozens of times, and answered maybe thousands of questions. I always endeavored to be truthful and straight about it. So, gee, just for a change of pace, I think I'll lie on this one question and do it on live television before one of my oversight committees who already knew the answer. Really?

I made a big mistake, which I've acknowledged. I didn't lie. Big difference. By the way, even if I had been on the same page with Sen. Wyden when he asked the question. I would still have been in a bad place because at that time the program was classified.

That's right. Edward Snowden's revelations came very shortly after that, if my recollections were accurate.

Right. This exchange was in March of 2013, and he fled to China in June.

Snowden has said that watching you testify on television -- watching you lie, as he put it -- influenced his decision to do what he did. Do you believe that?

No. That's disingenuous at best because he was purloining secrets eight months before that exchange. So that's baloney.

Andrew O'Hehir

Andrew O'Hehir is executive editor of Salon.