Director of National Intelligence James Clapper announced on Thursday he has submitted his resignation letter, a long-expected move that paves the way for the next administration to name its pick for the United States’ top spy.
“I submitted my letter of resignation last night, which felt pretty good,” Clapper told the House Select Intelligence Committee. “I’ve got 64 days left and I think I'd have a hard time with my wife anything past that.”
His letter of resignation will be effective at noon on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said on Twitter.
Clapper, 75, spent more than 50 years in public service, achieving the rank of lieutenant general in the United States Air Force. Before becoming DNI, Clapper previously held top roles in the intelligence community as the director of both the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, as well as the post of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
Clapper’s exit comes as no surprise — he has long said he would be out the door along with President Barack Obama.
He joked in September at the Intelligence & National Security Summit that “this year, I realize about the only thing we'll be rolling out the door in the next four months, is me.” He also said at that conference that every presidential transition is a very vulnerable time, “so I’m here with a message: it’ll be okay.”
Clapper made headlines several times over the course of this year’s presidential campaign. In July, he turned down House Speaker Paul Ryan’s call to deny Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton access to classified briefings, and in October, Clapper and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson released a statement officially accusing Russia of the hacks targeting U.S. political organizations.
The spy chief was appointed by Obama and confirmed by the Senate in 2010. Clapper took the reins of an agency that was trying to find its bearings in the post-9/11 landscape. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created in the wake of 9/11 in response to the failure of the IC to share information and connect the dots that might have prevented the attacks. The report of the 9/11 Commission called for the position’s introduction as well as other major overhauls in the intelligence community.
Reflecting on American intelligence on the 15th anniversary of 9/11, former CIA and NSA director General Michael Hayden wrote for The Cipher Brief that the IC reforms have been a mixed bag, but sharing “has gotten better.” On the DNI, Hayden indicated the director “continues to have more responsibilities than he has authorities, forcing him to negotiate and exhort rather than direct, which perversely contributes to a growth of bureaucratic staff to try to manage things. Even here, though, the mismatch is not so bad that I (or apparently many others) would call for a major new restructuring.”
“This structure can be made to work well enough with the right people, as Jim Clapper and others have demonstrated, so all eyes should be on the personnel choices of the incoming Administration,” Hayden wrote.
Clapper was the fourth DNI in just over five years. The first two directors served for less than two years each. John Negroponte, the first director who took office in April of 2005, was a career foreign service officer who left the DNI post to serve as Deputy Secretary of State, while the next director, Mike McConnell, went out with the change of administrations from President George W. Bush to President Barack Obama. Following McConnell, DNI Dennis Blair had a rocky tenure lasting only 16 months — the retired U.S. Navy admiral frequently clashed with the White House as well as CIA Director Leon Panetta. President Obama asked for his resignation.
Clapper brought a degree of stability to the office in his six-year tenure, but faced a range of criticisms, notably on the ODNI’s bloated bureaucracy, and his testimony in early 2013 that the NSA did “not wittingly” collect any type of data on Americans. NSA leaker Edward Snowden later claimed that was the “breaking point” for him to release classified documents he had taken on NSA’s extensive data mining program.
Since its formation, the ODNI has sought to coordinate efforts among the various intelligence agencies. There has been some tension between the DNI and CIA, given the set-up’s structure. Before the creation of the DNI, the CIA director not only ran the spy agency but was also responsible for coordinating the activities of the other 16 IC agencies and departments. Today, the DNI oversees the 17 federal intelligence agencies and serves as the principal intelligence advisor to the president. As DNI, Clapper also helped spearhead the post-9/11 demand for increased intelligence sharing between the agencies.
In 2009, departing DNI McConnell noted, “anytime you have organizations that have similar interests, you're going to have disputes. And particularly if the two leaders aren't working together and having a partnership and so on, the warfare at the trench level gets to be pretty much a raging battle.”
At Thursday’s Intelligence Committee hearing, ranking member Rep. Adam Schiff (D- CA) thanked Clapper for “honorably serving us since the 1960s as an Air Force officer, later as director of DIA, NGA and as the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and of course, the last six years of DNI.”
“You know there was a rumor out there that you might be asked to stay on a little longer during the transition,” Schiff added.
Clapper quickly shot that down, saying it “felt pretty good” to submit his resignation letter on Wednesday night.
Members of Congress quickly responded to the official announcement. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said that Clapper “has provided steady leadership for the Intelligence Community and wise counsel to the President and the Congress” throughout his long career.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) — who asked Clapper the question during the 2013 hearing about the NSA’s data collection on Americans — released a blistering statement saying that during Clapper’s tenure “senior intelligence officials engaged in a deception spree regarding mass surveillance. Top officials, officials who reported to Director Clapper, repeatedly misled the American people and even lied to them.”
Senate Intelligence committee senators James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Angus King (I-Maine), meanwhile, sent a letter to president-elect Donald Trump, writing that they sought to “strongly encourage” him “to nominate an experienced DNI that can serve these functions and build an intelligence community leadership team that will put a high value on collaboration.”
During the campaign, Trump was often dismissive of the intelligence community. Asked in August whether he trusted intelligence, Trump said “not so much from the people that have been doing it for our country.” The president-elect also repeatedly questioned and denied Russia’s involvement in the hacks. In the third October debate, Trump said that “our country has no idea” whether it was Russia — a statement that came weeks after DNI Clapper and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson officially accused Russia of intending to interfere with the U.S. election process by hacking the Democratic National Committee.
Mackenzie Weinger is a national security reporter at The Cipher Brief. Follow her on Twitter @mweinger.
Pam Benson and Kenzi Inman contributed to this report.
