House GOP Requests Criminal Probe of Intel Czar James Clapper

On Thursday, seven House Republicans sent a letter to  Attorney General Eric Holder requesting that the Justice Department  open a criminal investigation into whether Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress.

In the letter GOP Reps. Darrell Issa (Calif.), James Sensenbrenner Jr. (Wis.), Trent Franks (Ariz.), Blake Farenthold (Texas), Trey Gowdy (S.C.), Raúl Labrador (Idaho) and Ted Poe (Texas) “said Clapper’s ‘willful lie under oath’ fuels distrust in the government and undermines the ability of Congress to do its job.”

“There are differences of opinion about the propriety of the NSA’s data collection programs,” they wrote. “There can be no disagreement, however, on the basic premise that congressional witnesses must answer truthfully.”

During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper whether the National Security Agency collects data on millions of Americans. Clapper insisted that the NSA does not — or at least does “not wittingly” — collect any information on Americans in bulk.

After documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA collects records on virtually all U.S. phone calls, Clapper apologized for the false comment.

Of course, there’s only a 0 to .000001% chance that Holder will actually cooperate with Oversight’s request on this, so I’m not sure what they’re objective, here, is.

On Fox News, a couple of weeks ago, Sensenbrenner said Clapper should be prosecuted for lying to Congress

One Republican Congressman who is definitely not on board this effort, is Rep. Peter King, who responded viscerally to Senator Rand Paul’s recent comments about Clapper.

Rep. Peter King said fellow Republican Sen. Rand Paul owes the nation’s top intelligence official an apology after saying he should resign for “lying” to a Senate committee about a controversial surveillance program.

The New York congressman also said that Paul’s comparison of National Intelligence Director James Clapper to NSA leaker Edward Snowden is “absolutely disgraceful.”

“For Senator Paul to compare that patriot, General Clapper, with someone like Snowden, who is a traitor, who has put American lives at risk – Senator Paul should be ashamed of himself,” King said Thursday on CNN’s “The Situation Room.”

“It’s an absolute disgrace. He disgraced his office and he owes General Clapper an apology immediately.”

Meanwhile, the founder of the political-watchdog organizations Judicial Watch and FreedomWatch, is on a one-man mission to have Obama impeached for violating the constitutional rights of American citizens with the NSA spying.

Fresh from winning a restraining order against the National Security Agency’s telephone surveillance, attorney Larry Klayman declared that the misdeeds of Richard Nixon, who resigned in disgrace, pale in comparison to President Obama’s.

“In Watergate, Richard Nixon faced impeachment for breaking into the offices of the chairman of the Democratic National Party,” Klayman told WND in an interview.

“Obama has broken into the homes of 300 million Americans.”

WND asked Klayman if he was calling for the impeachment of Obama.

“Yes,” Klayman responded. “The NSA and the Obama administration are engaging in criminal behavior, and both are lying.”

He called it the “most outrageous violation of constitutional rights in American history.”

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His case, on behalf of a Verizon Wireless customer, was launched after the extent of government spying on Americans was unveiled by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who said the court’s decision made him feel justified in releasing classified documents.

Named in the case are the NSA, Department of Justice and several U.S. officials, including President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.

Klayman alleged in a WND interview Monday that after he filed the case, he was put under surveillance by the NSA.

The complaint alleges the government, with the participation of private telephone companies, has been conducting “a secret and illegal government scheme to intercept and analyze vast quantities of domestic telephonic communications.”

Klayman dismissed Obama administration arguments that the NSA is collecting only “metadata” and not recording for analysis the content of ordinary citizens’ conversation unless there is suspicion of criminal activity that might violate the Patriot Act or other national security legislation.

“The NSA takes interest in countless Americans, even boyfriends and girlfriends of NSA employees, as we now know,” he argued.

“If you end up being a person of interest to the NSA or the Department of Justice, the NSA recording of telephone conversations permits the NSA to know everything about you, even whether or not your wife is pregnant, just by the number of times she calls her doctor and the pattern of her health-care-related telephone conversations.”