Andrew Napolitano on the NSA's Admission of Wrongdoing

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Pete Souza/White House

Last week, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper sent a brief letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in which he admitted that agents of the National Security Agency (NSA) have been reading innocent Americans' emails and text messages and listening to digital recordings of their telephone conversations. That the NSA is doing this is not newsworthy—Edward Snowden has told the world of this during the past 10 months—but what is newsworthy is that the NSA has admitted this, and those admissions have far-reaching consequences.

In his letter to Wyden, Clapper not only implicitly acknowledged that Snowden was correct all along, but also that he, Clapper, lied to and materially misled the Senate Intelligence Committee. Andrew Napolitano asks: Shouldn't we expect that Clapper be prosecuted for lying to a congressional committee about the most massive government plot in U.S. history to violate the Fourth Amendment?