Media trying pretty hard to save Susan Rice

Here's the problem for Trump: Even if you believe that Rice did something that was wrong -- and virtually every intelligence official insists unmasking is a commonplace procedure -- it still doesn't address his claim that he had evidence that Obama has authorized the wiretapping of Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign. Trump's phones being tapped -- and that order coming from the commander in chief -- is simply not the same thing as the national security adviser asking for the names of Trump transition aides in contact with Russian intelligence officials. Again, even if you believe that Rice did something that was wrong -- and her strange decision to kind of, sort of, deny that she knew anything about the unmasking will add fuel to that fire -- it is still not proof, or anything close to proof, that Obama ordered Trump to be wiretapped. If proof exists that Rice went beyond unmasking and was responsible for the leaking of Trump transition official Michael Flynn's conversations with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak -- and there is no proof of that to this point -- then it absolutely warrants closer scrutiny. But, even if that was the case, it would not validate the claim that Trump made that he was wiretapped by Obama. In fact, what we know is that the FBI, the former director of national intelligence and even House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes, R-California, have said definitively that Trump was not wiretapped.

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Ms. Rice received summaries of U.S. eavesdropping either when foreign officials were discussing the Trump team, or when foreign officials were conversing with a Trump transition member. The surveillance was legally authorized, but the identities of U.S. citizens are typically masked so they cannot be known outside intelligence circles. Ms. Rice asked for and learned the identity of the Trump official, whose name hasn’t been publicly disclosed and our source declined to share. Our source did confirm that Ms. Rice also examined dozens of other intelligence summaries that technically masked Trump official identities but were written in such a way as to make obvious who those officials were. This means that the masking was essentially meaningless. All this is highly unusual—and troubling. Unmasking does occur, but it is typically done by intelligence or law-enforcement officials engaged in antiterror or espionage investigations. Ms. Rice would have had no obvious need to unmask Trump campaign officials other than political curiosity. We’re told by a source who has seen the unmasked documents that they included political information about the Trump transition team’s meetings and policy intentions. We are also told that none of these documents had anything to do with Russia or the FBI investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. While we don't know if Ms. Rice requested these dozens of reports, we are told that they were only distributed to a select group of recipients—conveniently including Ms. Rice. The media's defense of Rice's actions as no big deal assume that she was requesting the unmasking for reasons connected to a legitimate national security matter. Yet the sources talking to Bloomberg and the WSJ say that is not the case. The requests were not connected to the Russia thing, nor to any other known FBI investigation. That's what all the media spin is ignoring: Whether it's unusual is not the issue. The issue is whether there was any legitimate reason for it to be happening, and it doesn't appear there was.

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