James Clapper resigns as director of national intelligence

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper has submitted his resignation, ending a six-year run as the head of America’s various spying agencies.

Mr. Clapper announced the news at the start of a House Intelligence Committee hearing Thursday morning.

“I submitted my letter of resignation last night, which felt pretty good,” Mr. Clapper said. “I’ve got 64 days left and I think I would have a hard time with my wife with anything past that.”

Mr. Clapper, who served in the U.S. intelligence community for more than half a century, had said in recent interviews that he was planning to retire at the end of President Obama’s second term in office.

The development that comes as speculation swirls around whom President-elect Donald Trump will nominate to fill key intelligence community and national security posts in his incoming cabinet.

Mr. Clapper’s comments during Thursday’s hearing came after the Intelligence Committee’s ranking Democrat, Adam Schiff of California, said he hoped Mr. Clapper would be willing to stay on as director of national intelligence “a little longer” during Mr. Trump’s transition into the presidency.

“Maybe four years longer,” Mr. Schiff quipped, drawing laughter in the hearing room.

Mr. Schiff also thanked Mr. Clapper for his “honorable service to us since the 1960s.”

Mr. Clapper rose through the ranks of the U.S. Air Force between the 1960s and 1990s, before serving as director of the defense intelligence agency under President George H.W. Bush and later President Clinton.

He headed the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency under Mr. Bush and was then undersecretary of defense for intelligence under Mr. Bush and later President Obama. Mr. Obama then selected him to be the fourth director of national intelligence in 2010.

Mr. Schiff said that as DNI — a post created during the U.S. intelligence community reorganization following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — Mr. Clapper had taken “a position that was still very much in the process of formation and gave it very substantive and effective content.”

“We’re very grateful for all you have done,” the congressman said. “You’ve always exhibited sober judgment and put the fate of the nation first.”

Lawmakers were expected to hash through the development further during a closed Senate intelligence hearing slated for Thursday afternoon.