James Robert Clapper Jr. (born March 14, 1941) is a retired lieutenant general in the United States Air Force and former Director of National Intelligence.

On June 5, 2010, President Barack Obama nominated Clapper to replace Dennis C. Blair as United States Director of National Intelligence.

He served two tours of duty in Southeast Asia where he commanded a signals intelligence detachment based at a listening post in Thailand's Udon Thani Province, and flew 73 combat support missions in EC-47s, including some over Laos and Cambodia.

[20] The initiative failed because it created functional stovepipes which "reduced the coherence of the analytic effort", whereupon Clapper decided to restore the original organizational structure using strong regional elements.

[21] In 1996, alongside General Wayne Downing, he was a member of the investigatory inquiry into the Khobar Towers bombing, which killed 20 people, including 19 American servicemen.

In October 2006, he began working as a chief operating officer for the British military intelligence company Detica, now DFI and U.S.–based subsidiary of BAE Systems.

[25] Clapper defended the private sector's role in intelligence-gathering in his 2010 confirmation hearings telling the committee, "I worked as a contractor for six years myself, so I think I have a good understanding of the contribution that they have made and will continue to make.

[27] While teaching at Georgetown, he was officially nominated by President George W. Bush to be Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (USD(I)) on January 29, 2007, and confirmed by the United States Senate on April 11, 2007.

[30] In an official statement in the White House Rose Garden on June 5, 2010, Obama announced his nomination of Clapper, saying he "possesses a quality that I value in all my advisers: a willingness to tell leaders what we need to know even if it's not what we want to hear.

During his testimony for the position, Clapper pledged to advance the DNI's authorities, exert tighter control over programming and budgeting, and provide oversight over the CIA's use of drones in Pakistan.

[38][39][40][41] In January 2012, Clapper said that "some Iranian officials, probably including supreme leader Ali Khamenei, have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived US actions that threaten the regime."

"[42] In February 2012, Clapper told the Senate that if Iran is attacked over its alleged nuclear weapons program, it could respond by closing the Strait of Hormuz to ships and launch missiles at regional U.S. forces and allies.

"[47] When Edward Snowden was asked during a January 26, 2014, television interview in Moscow on what the decisive moment was or what caused him to whistle-blow, he replied: "Sort of the breaking point was seeing the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress.

"[48] On June 5, 2013, The Guardian published the first of the global surveillance documents leaked by Edward Snowden, including a top secret court order showing that the NSA had collected phone records from over 120 million Verizon subscribers.

"[67] On December 19, 2013, seven Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee called on Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate Clapper, stating "witnesses cannot be allowed to lie to Congress.

[74][75][76][77] Caitlin Hayden, the White House National Security Council spokesperson, said in an e-mailed statement that Obama has "full faith in Director Clapper's leadership of the intelligence community.

[80][81] The following month he implemented a new pre-publication review policy for the ODNI's current and former employees that prohibits them from citing news reports based on leaks in their unofficial writings.

[83][84] On May 7, 2015, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that Section 215 of the Patriot Act did not authorize the bulk collection of metadata, which judge Gerard E. Lynch called a "staggering" amount of information.

"[86] In August 2015, fifty intelligence analysts working for United States Central Command (CENTCOM) complained to the Pentagon's Inspector General and the media, alleging that CENTCOM's senior leadership was altering or distorting intelligence reports on the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to paint a more optimistic picture of the ongoing war against ISIL forces in Iraq and Syria.

Clapper was also expected to take part in the ANU Crawford Australian Leadership Forum, the nation's pre-eminent dialogue of academics, parliamentarians and business leaders.

[97] Clapper had stopped receiving briefings on January 20 and was "not aware of the counterintelligence investigation Director Comey first referred to during his testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee for Intelligence on the 20th of March".

"[99] In a speech at Australia's National Press Club in June Clapper accused Trump of "ignorance or disrespect", called the firing of FBI director James Comey "inexcusable", and warned of an "internal assault on our institutions".

[103] In an August 2017 interview, Clapper stated that U.S. President Donald Trump having access to the nuclear codes is "pretty damn scary" and he questioned his fitness to be in office.

[105] In February 2019, Clapper said he agreed with former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe's opinion that President Donald Trump could be a "Russian asset".

[106] In October 2020, Clapper was part of a group of 51 former intelligence officials that signed a letter that stated the Biden laptop story “has the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation".

"[110] In 2003, Clapper, then head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, attempted to explain the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by asserting that the weapons materials were "unquestionably" shipped out of Iraq to Syria and other countries just before the American invasion, a "personal assessment" that Clapper's own agency head at the time, David Burpee, "could not provide further evidence to support.

"[111] In an interview on December 20, 2010, with Diane Sawyer of ABC News, Clapper indicated he was completely unaware that 12 alleged terrorists had been arrested in Great Britain earlier that day.

[115] In March 2011, Clapper was heard at the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services commenting on the 2011 Libyan civil war that "over the longer term" Gaddafi "will prevail".

This position was loudly questioned by the White House, when National Security Adviser Thomas E. Donilon qualified his statement as a "static and one-dimensional assessment" and argued that "the lost legitimacy [of Gaddafi] matters.

[120] He stopped receiving briefings on January 20 and was "not aware of the counterintelligence investigation Director Comey first referred to during his testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee for Intelligence on the 20th of March".