https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/5-people-who-lied-...
What I don’t understand is why Clapper has to settle with merely “not being charged with perjury” while Brett Kavanaugh not only wasn’t charged with perjury, and continued in government service (in a position he got through his perjury) when his lies were established, but got promoted to the Supreme Court (note, I’m referring to his blatant lies about his involvement with the Bush-era torture program during his Court of Appeals confirmation hearing, not any perjury he may have committed during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings.)
He started his career clerking for conservative judges including Judge Kozinski and Justice Kennedy. Then in the late 90s he worked for Ken Starr doing trumped up anti-Clinton “investigations”, and authored the Starr Report. In 2000 he was part of George W. Bush’s legal team that worked with the GOP-majority Supreme Court to prevent Florida from counting all of the votes from the 2000 election, blatantly unconstitutionally (and against all precedent) stomping on the Florida Supreme Court. For his services he was hired by Alberto Gonzalez at the Bush DOJ. Then later during the Bush administration he was at the Federalist Society, in charge of choosing which judicial activists the GOP should promote to federal courts (he also perjured himself answering Senate questions about his work there, FWIW).
Prior comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28098290
I've never gotten the impression that Americans have very much love for the intelligence community. The military, yes, the intelligence community, no.
Congress has slapped the intelligence committee before (in the aftermath of the Church Committee[1]).
It's just that post-9/11 the powers of America's intelligence agencies were tremendously increased and they were given a much longer leash.
Now that 9/11 is more than 20 years in the past they might get slapped again, but it'll probably take a bigger scandal than Snowden's revelations to do it.. and such a scandal has to happen in peace time if it's to have any effect.
The COINTELPRO revelations were promoted as ending the program, but there is no public evidence anything changed. The stories about attempts at spying via ESP were themselves successful disinformation campaigns conducted against the American public. Most people who have heard of them believe them, wholesale.
If you get caught in one of these scandals, you just have to wait out the news cycles in the shadows where you typically are anyway. Or you "take one for the team" like Clapper did - no doubt with a lot of legal advice from civil servant lawyers. It doesn't really matter whether or not the public tells intelligence officers/operatives "Thank you for your service!" You can also see the retroactive immunity congress granted these organizations and impassioned defenses they offered.
There is no stomach (or understanding) to demand better of the IC in any way reminiscent of the Church or Pike committee times.
I can't really fathom the magnitude of wrongdoing that would now be needed to change how these organizations think and work, or have key staff actually slapped with enduring punishments.
