In an August 2017 interview, Clapper stated that U.S. President Donald Trump having access to the nuclear codes is "pretty damn scary" and he questioned his fitness to be in office. In February 2019, Clapper said he agreed with former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s opinion that President Donald Trump could be a "Russian asset". In May 2017, Clapper said that Russia is the primary adversary of the United States. He explained why he believes Russians are so dangerous:  If you put that in context with everything else we knew the Russians were doing to interfere with the election, and just the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique. So we were concerned. In June 2017, Clapper said that "[t]he Russians are not our friends", because it is in their "genes to be opposed, diametrically opposed, to the United States and western democracies." Clapper serves on the "Advisory Board of the Committee to Investigate Russia", a nonpartisan, non-profit group formed with the intention of helping "Americans understand and recognize the scope and scale of Russia's continuing attacks on our democracy." In 2003, Clapper, then head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, attempted to explain the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by asserting that the weapons materials were "unquestionably" shipped out of Iraq to Syria and other countries just before the American invasion, a "personal assessment" that Clapper's own agency head at the time, David Burpee, "could not provide further evidence to support." In an interview on December 20, 2010, with Diane Sawyer of ABC News, Clapper indicated he was completely unaware that 12 alleged terrorists had been arrested in Great Britain earlier that day. In February 2011, when mass demonstrations were on the verge of toppling Hosni Mubarak's presidency in Egypt, Clapper told the House Intelligence Committee during a hearing that:  The term 'Muslim Brotherhood' ... is an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda as a perversion of Islam... They have pursued social ends, a betterment of the political order in Egypt, et cetera. ... In other countries, there are also chapters or franchises of the Muslim Brotherhood, but there is no overarching agenda, particularly in pursuit of violence, at least internationally. The Obama administration took the rare step later that day of correcting its own intelligence chief after the statement drew scrutiny among members of Congress.