THE NOSE ON YOUR FACE:

In an interview for the Yahoo News podcast "Skullduggery," Clapper told Chief Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff and Editor in Chief Daniel Klaidman that intelligence officials were "pretty confident" that they had identified the conduit for the hacked emails to WikiLeaks by the time he left office in January 2017. He declined, however, to provide any details about the suspect's identity.

"We had a suspect," said Clapper. "I don't know whether the suspicions we had at the time were conveyed [to Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller] or whether they were validated." U.S. intelligence officials were "pretty confident at the time but not sufficient enough to publicize it," he said. [...]

[C]lapper told "Skullduggery" that the WikiLeaks transfer "cut-out" was selected by the Russians for a reason -- so that Assange could tell the world he did not get the DNC emails from Russian intelligence. "The real point was it was an attempt to ensure [Assange] plausible deniability," Clapper said.

Clapper was responding to questions about a little-noticed passage in his new book, "Facts and Fears: Hard Truths From a Life in Intelligence." In the book, Clapper recounts how the U.S. intelligence community concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian leadership had publicly dumped the DNC emails after they decided in March 2016 that "it was worth the risk of diplomatic blowback if they were caught" hacking the DNC. This gave the green light to Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, to go "on the offense, exfiltrating emails and large volumes of data."

Then, Clapper added: "In April, Russia used a third party 'cut-out' to send more than 19,000 DNC emails and more than 8,000 documents to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, attempting to cover its tracks and to give WikiLeaks some degree of deniability in knowing the source of the leaks."

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