President Obama’s former director of national intelligence is accusing Rudy Giuliani of purposefully mischaracterizing his comments about the FBI’s use of an informant in the Russian investigation.
“He’s deliberately misinterpreting what I said,” James Clapper told CNN’s John Berman Thursday on “New Day.”
“There is a huge difference between the use of an informant and a spy, a term I’ve never liked anyway,” Clapper said.
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Giuliani, who is acting as an attorney for President Trump, said on Wednesday that Clapper is responsible in part for Trump’s use of the term “spy” to describe the FBI informant who contacted people associated with the Trump campaign.
“I think the guy responsible for that, to some extent, is Clapper because when the president first called it spying, everyone disputed it, said it was an informant. That seemed like a semantic difference,” Giuliani said.
“Clapper said, ‘we were spying, we were spying on Russia, and as part of that, we ended up inside the Trump campaign,’ ” he continued.
An informant for the government met with three of Trump’s campaign advisers in 2016 in the early months of the counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s role in the election.
Trump has repeatedly described this as an instance of spying on his campaign. The rhetoric comes as Trump’s team engages in a public relations offensive against special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s election meddling, which was launched after the FBI’s work.