Spying and Lying

Spying on Congress? Business as Usual.

The news that Special Counsel Jack Smith spied on Congress and then lied about it should be of no surprise.

It’s far from the first time something like that has happened.

And since nobody has been held accountable in the past in any meaningful way, why would anybody expect the behavior to stop? Why wouldn’t the abuses expand?

The same could be said after the forensically proven government spying on me and my family. I was an investigative correspondent at CBS News at the time. The Department of Justice has defended the improper spying against me, in court. under Obama, Trump, and Biden—rather than holding the guilty parties accountable.

Let’s look at an early scandal that left the guilty officials unscathed and foreshadowed more to come.

In March 2013, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper gave false information under oath before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked him directly: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

Clapper replied: “No, sir… Not wittingly.”

This was untrue. We didn’t know it at the time but the National Security Agency (NSA) was secretly collecting massive amounts of telephone metadata, records of who called whom, when, and for how long, on tens of millions of Americans through the Section 215 program, along with other bulk surveillance programs.

But just months later, in June 2013, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked a trove of classified documents to journalists, including Glenn Greenwald. The documents revealed the vast scope of NSA surveillance, including:

• The PRISM program (collecting data from tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple).

• Bulk collection of Americans’ phone records.

• Other global surveillance programs targeting both foreigners and U.S. persons.

The Snowden leaks exposed Clapper’s testimony as untrue. There was initial outrage on Capitol Hill.

In July of 2013, Clapper was forced to return to Congress to address the growing scandal. He faced sharp questioning from both Republicans and Democrats.

In a public hearing and closed sessions, lawmakers, including some Democrats, expressed anger and accused him of misleading Congress under oath.

There was talk that Clapper would surely have to resign. After all, how could he be trusted if he had not only lied under oath, but if he had also allowed the unconstitutional-seeming mass surveillance of innocent Americans in the first place?

Clapper apologized, claiming he had given the “least untruthful” answer he could. He also claimed he “misunderstood” Sen. Wyden’s question (which was crystal clear).

But after private meetings on the Hill, Clapper somehow seemed to turn everything around.

No formal charges were brought against him, he was not fired, and he actually managed to use the controversy to lobby for expanded authority. Clapper remained DNI until January 2017.

That wasn’t the only big surveillance controversy.

In 2014 and 2015, reports emerged that the CIA had spied on Senate Intelligence Committee staffers while they were investigating the CIA’s own enhanced interrogation program. This included the CIA getting unauthorized access to Senate computers and documents. Senate staff, under Democrat leadership at the time, discovered the spying, leading to major bipartisan outrage.

At the time this was considered almost unheard of. Maybe spying on Congress had happened before but this was the first time the public at large heard about it. Here was an agency that spying on the very Congressional committees and members who were conducting oversight the agency!

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), then-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was very public in her criticism. In March of 2014, she publicly accused the CIA of spying on Congress in a dramatic floor speech. She described it as a serious constitutional breach.

In 2015, there were further revelations about broader intelligence community surveillance of members of Congress, including monitoring of calls with American-Jewish groups, foreign officials, and others. There were reports of leaked recordings involving lawmakers such as Jane Harman (D) and Dennis Kucinich (D).

Still, nobody was held accountable. All was forgiven.

Obviously, everybody now knows the FBI also improperly spied on Trump officials, and Trump himself. And that the head of the FBI, James Comey, was recommended for prosecution for taking sensitive records about Trump out of the office in order to use them against Trump. (The Dept. of Justice, of course, declined prosecution.)

Now we’ve almost grown numb to news of improper and possibly illegal government spying—since we’ve heard it so many times!

No longer is the outrage as loud or universal. It’s as if the attitude now is, “Of course the government spies on Congress. They spy on all of us.”

Nobody should be surprised that it continues.