President Obama says Clapper ‘Should Have Been More careful’

President Barack Obama said that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper “should have been more careful” when he testified to a Senate panel in 2013 that the National Security Agency did not collect data on millions of Americans.

President Obama did not suggest that he was disappointed with National Intelligence Director James Clapper for not being honest in his testimony before Congress in 2013 about the mass surveillance programs that were revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Clapper later justified his untrue answer by saying it was the "least untruthful" one he could give. "Least untruthful" was not exactly a term President Obama used on the campaign trail. So did he have concerns about what Clapper said? "I think that Jim Clapper himself would acknowledge, and has acknowledged, that he should have been more careful about how he responded," President Obama said. "His concern was that he had a classified program that he couldn't talk about, and he was in an open hearing in which he was asked, he was prompted to disclose a program, and so he felt he was caught between a rock and a hard place." The President acknowledged that the leaks, including details about the wide-ranging use of the surveillance programs, damaged the confidence of Americans as well as other nations. "It's going to take some time" to win back that confidence, he said. "It's going to take some work, partly because the technology has just moved so quickly that discussions that needed to be had didn't happen fast enough."