On Thursday, Barack Obama said once again that his strategy for defeating the Islamic State is working: “We are in a better position now than we were last month, and a better position last month than we were three months ago.”

But that’s not the opinion of James Clapper, director of National Intelligence. The same day that Obama was giving his saccharine rah-rah speech, Clapper told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that “unpredictable instability has become the new normal.” With violent extremists operating in 40 countries, and with dozens of other countries at risk for developing instability and thus becoming breeding grounds of terror, the United States faces the highest threat of terrorism since 9/11, Clapper said.

In August, it came to light that U.S. Central Command was tainting the intelligence it fed to Barack Obama, making it appear that the fight against “the JV team” was going better than it actually was. This week, chair of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes said the committee heard from many whistleblowers within CENTCOM accusing the agency of deleting emails and documents to hide information about the fight against the Islamic State from Congress. Over half the analysts the committee talked to said they had concerns over the integrity of their reports.

Judge Andrew Napolitano said that these reports of destroyed evidence will fall on deaf ears. “If the president’s purpose,” Napolitano argued, “or the purpose of the people around him, was to shade intelligence with which the American people are familiar, in order to justify its behavior, they are not going to prosecute the people that did the shading.”