US intelligence chief James Clapper resigns

US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has submitted his letter of resignation, he has told a congressional panel.

Clapper, who had clashed with President-elect Donald Trump’s aide Michael Flynn, told a hearing of the House intelligence committee on Wednesday that he had submitted his resignation on Wednesday night and felt “pretty good” about it.

“I’ve got 64 days left and I think I’d have a hard time with my wife with anything past that,” Clapper, a career intelligence officer and air force general, told the committee. Clapper’s final day will be the day of the presidential inauguration, on 20 January.

Clapper said last year that he would step down at the end of President Barack Obama’s final term in office.

Clapper’s resignation comes as the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump begins discussions on cabinet appointments.

Clapper, who was appointed by Obama in 2010 largely on the strength of his relationship with former defense secretary Robert Gates,  played a leading role in firing Flynn from the directorship of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014. Flynn, a retired US army lieutenant general, became one of the only national security officials of any note to back Trump, and is expected to take a leading role in Trump’s administration, reportedly national security adviser.

Clapper held numerous senior positions in the intelligence community throughout his decades-long career, including the leadership of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, before serving as Gates’s undersecretary of defense for intelligence. But it is his time as director of national intelligence during the intelligence disclosures by whistleblower  Edward Snowden that is likely to define his career in Washington.

In a famous exchange in March 2013, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, asked Clapper, "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

Clapper answered, untruthfully: "No, sir... not wittingly."

Just two months later, Snowden left the US with 10,000 documents exposing the extent of government surveillance. Snowden's files showed that the NSA was indeed collecting telephone metadata of millions of law-abiding Americans. Clapper was never charged with lying under oath, however.

After Snowden revealed otherwise, Clapper offered a shifting series of explanations for his publicly uttered falsehood.

According to the Guardian, as Clapper’s resignation became public, two intelligence committee members, independent Angus King of Maine and Republican James Lankford of Oklahoma, wrote to Trump to urge the president-elect to prioritise the selection of Clapper’s replacement.