Former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper suggested Sunday, during an interview Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” that President Donald Trump is engaged in an “assault” on U.S. institutions.

Clapper and “State of the Union” host Jake Tapper went back and forth over the dangers of the president “firing the checks and balances” that the Founding Fathers put in place. The former DNI director lamented that Trump ousted Comey while he was in the midst of conducting an investigation into potential collusion between Trump’s associates and the Russians to snatch the presidential election away from former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

“There’s no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions.”

Yet Clapper himself once severely undermined the credibility of U.S. intelligence agencies. The former director of national intelligence lied under oath about whether or not the National Security Agency was collecting mass surveillance on the American people.

“The developments of the past week are very bothersome, very disturbing to me,” Clapper told Tapper. “I think, in many ways, our institutions are under assault both externally — and that’s the big news here, is Russian interference in our election system — and I think, as well, our institutions are under assault internally.”

“Internally from the president?” Tapper suggested.

“Exactly,” Clapper replied.

Tapper pressed further, asking whether Trump’s firing of Comey constituted an “assault” on “our institutions” because the president was “firing the checks and the balances.”

“Well, I think, you know, the Founding Fathers in their genius created a system of three co-equal branches of government and a built-in system of checks and balances,” Clapper said. “And I feel as though that’s under assault and is eroding.”

When Tapper asked Clapper if he had been “surprised at how quiet Republicans on Capitol Hill have been” about the Comey firing, Clapper urged each member of Congress to “think in terms of their own conscience.”

“And I can’t, I can’t characterize it as being surprised. I just hope they’ll speak up,” Clapper said.

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During a Senate hearing in March 2013, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper point-blank if the NSA had collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” While under oath, Clapper had replied, “No, sir.”

When Wyden pressed him further, Clapper added, “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.”

Edward Snowden later infamously leaked global surveillance documents proving that the NSA had been collecting millions of Americans phone records, he cited Clapper’s testimony as the “breaking point” that spurred him to publish the classified information.

“I would say sort of the breaking point is seeing the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress,” Snowden said in a January 2014 television interview in Moscow. “There’s no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions. Seeing that really meant for me there was no going back.”

Faced with his deception, Clapper offered varying explanations for the lie, which undermined the intelligence agencies’ credibility.

In a statement months after the hearing in June 2013, Clapper admitted his answer was “clearly erroneous” and apologized.

But Clapper told NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell later during an interview on June 7, 2013, that he “responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner by saying no.” He insisted that he viewed Wyden’s question as the “When did you stop beating your wife?” kind of question, thus justifying the “least untruthful” answer.

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Wyden was outraged over Clapper’s “deception spree regarding mass surveillance” and his failure to correct the record immediately after the hearing.

“Regardless of what was going through the director’s head when he testified, failing to correct the record was a deliberate decision to lie to the American people about what their government was doing,” Wyden had said in a statement at the time.

The former DNI’s behavior led several lawmakers, in both parties, to accuse him of perjury and demand his immediate resignation.

“This lie was particularly egregious because the answer actually affected the lives of every American,” former Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) told U.S. News & World Report in an email from November 2016. “Clapper’s subsequent attempts at rationalization are no different from what Richard Nixon said: ‘When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.’ If we want to call ourselves a nation of laws, then it is important that Clapper be prosecuted, and convicted.”

So Clapper faces something of a credibility gap in accusing other officials of undermining the credibility of U.S. institutions.