James Clapper was eating lunch in Muscat, Oman, on November 9, 2016, when at 2:31 am EST Donald Trump[1] was declared the winner of the presidential election. Clapper was on one of his final trips abroad at the end of a 54-year-long career in the military and intelligence, working with allies to shore up US interests overseas. Although he didn’t know it at the time, the upcoming presidential transition would make the retired Air Force general and director of national intelligence more famous than he ever was when he worked in government.
Today, he has become an outspoken critic of the Trump administration, a regular—and particularly fiery[2]—voice on cable news, questioning the president’s moral and mental fitness for office. In turn, he’s become the embodiment of Trump’s “deep state,” condemned by name regularly on the president’s Twitter feed. It’s a role that Clapper himself finds puzzling, as he recounts in his new memoir Facts and Fears: Hard Truths From a Life in Intelligence. He never intended to write a memoir; indeed, when I spent weeks interviewing Clapper and following him around before the election for what at the time was the sole long-form profile[3] of him ever written, he told me that his only real hopes after leaving office were to fade into private life and clean out his basement.
Yet he says he felt called to write the book after witnessing the first months of the behavior of the man elected during his Oman trip. He has remained a public face during the nearly 18 months since he left office, becoming increasingly outspoken as the president has both publicly attacked his former colleagues in the intelligence community and denied the increasingly damning questions surrounding his campaign’s contact