Two of the most vital works of non-fiction writing and documentary journalism in the 21st century are inexorably intertwined. They can’t really help it, seeing as how their authors were side by side and critical players in the events unfolding around them. As we approach the 10-year anniversary of the Snowden Leaks on the U.S. government’s domestic surveillance program later this June, the efforts of journalist Glenn Greenwald and documentarian Laura Poitras to detail those events remain painfully relevant and worth a revisit.

If you have the time to sit down for a few hours, Greenwald’s “No Place to Hide” provides a gripping and exhaustive detailing of how the documents got into his hands, but the real value is found in the analysis of the leaks themselves. Poitras’ “Citizen Four,” on the other hand, gives an actual fly-on-the-wall perspective of the most defining moment of the 21st century that isn’t 9/11 or COVID-19, putting you in the Hong Kong hotel room where they met Snowden for the first time.

Snowden’s decision to out himself was not done for fame or fortune and has in fact extracted a great price from him as a consequence. Greenwald and Poitras were Snowden’s partners in bringing this information to the American people, but their works are essential to explaining why he chose to do what he did. Anyone dismissing Snowden as a traitor or a spy should take a moment and hear it from the man himself as captured by the people who documented the whole saga every step of the way. Or you could just listen to perjuring hacks like James Clapper.

Clapper, then the director of National Intelligence, is the guy who sat before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and lied directly to Sen. Ron Wyden and the American people on March 12, 2013, when he denied that the NSA collected data on millions of American citizens. Clapper rubbed his head and stared ahead eyes glazed over and replied, “No, Sir. Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.”

Snowden himself was quoted as saying during a 2014 television interview from his exile in Moscow, that the inciting incident or “inflection point” that sent him on his path toward blowing the whistle on the government’s domestic spying program was in fact that infamous moment of pithy deception from Clapper.

“Sort of the breaking point was seeing the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. Seeing that really meant for me there was no going back,” Snowden said.

On June 5, 2013, The Guardian published the first wave of global surveillance documents leaked by Edward Snowden, which included cold hard evidence that over 120 million Verizon subscribers had their data collected by the NSA. That would prove to be only the tip of the iceberg, but that fact alone smeared Mr. Clapper with more than just a little egg. Clapper would go on to sit before establishment stenographer Andrea Mitchell of NBC and was given his chance to craft the Surveillance State’s apologia, saying, “I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner by saying no.”

In fact, he would go on to lament in his memoir that really the whole problem was that Senator Wyden technically shouldn’t have been allowed to ask him that question in that venue, or at least should have only been answered behind the wall of a classified letter that we unwashed plebs would never get to see.

Clapper would carry on in his capacity as DNI until customarily resigning during the transition between the Obama and Trump administrations. After a brief vacation Clapper suddenly reappeared as a pundit on CNN and has been a source of malignant disinformation and falsehood ever since.

A prolific peddler of the Big Lie around “Russian influence” over the Trump administration, Clapper was joined by ex-CIA director Jon Brennan to lend credence to any manner of speculation that fueled the segments of Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, and the ideological struggle session masquerading as late-night “comedy.” This pair were amongst the most prominent of the ever-growing coterie of Obama era intelligence spooks getting cushy media gigs at networks like CNN and MSNBC, using their backgrounds and lingering access to classified and top-secret clearances as a bulwark from the truth.

Clapper’s most recent deception was his endorsement along with 50 other former intelligence officials for the notion that the Hunter Biden Laptop story was Russian disinformation being delivered direct from the Kremlin. This letter was used by tech companies and so-called journalistic outlets to rationalize and defend the censorship of the story, and to discredit anyone trying to discuss or disseminate it. The record indicates that Clapper didn’t say anything but support for the narrative, despite how he might reframe the facts today.

Now that it has been revealed by the Twitter Files how much was done in its name, Clapper and his fellows are coming forward to deny that their letter says what it was understood to say. Clapper is accusing outlets like the website Politico of “message distortion,” and that he and his colleagues were simply “throwing a yellow flag” and shouldn’t have been taken as authorities on the issue. Awfully rich to be saying this over two years after the fact, with the election in question so far in the rear-view mirror that people are already jockeying for the next one.

Clapper had publicly called the New York Post’s censored coverage of the laptop “a bunch of garbage,” but now claims he had no idea the letter he put his name to was used by President Biden in the final debate with former President Trump to refute any reference to it. Biden would also go on to cite the letter in an interview with “60 Minutes,” using the authority and credibility of its signers to call it a “smear campaign.”

Clapper’s claims of ignorance and victim posturing is more than laughable, but so is the notion that this man can be taken credulously on any issue.

Now that the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees are calling Clapper and his fellows to the floor to answer for what they’ve done, I have no doubt that if they even deign to appear, they will bring with them only more distortion. They’ll pirouette around whatever questions are thrown their way and get head pats and cookies from the Democrats on the committee like Jamie Raskin, who wielded the lies of Clapper and his fellows just as readily as everyone else.

So, ladies and gentlemen, theys and thems, zies and zes, hirs and zirs, the lesson today is to remember the name of James Clapper, and never forget how frequently and deliberately he has chosen to deceive you. It doesn’t matter what ideology you adhere to, or who your God is, or who you voted for, James Clapper is a government spy who has consistently lied to the American people. In retirement, the man has given us no indication he will change his ways anytime soon, and for some reason he will still be granted credibility by those who should be taking him to task. So it goes.