WhatFinger

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Susan 'YouTube video' Rice requested identities of Trump associates spied upon in 'incidental' intel collection

By Robert Laurie ——--April 3, 2017

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You'll remember Susan Rice as the first prominent face of the Benghazi "YouTube video" story. She was the one that appeared on the Sunday Morning News shows blaming the attack on a "spontaneous uprising" sparked by a cheap online film that no one had seen. Later, she became Obama's national security adviser, and infamously told CNN that "we should expect" Iran to use that pallet of cash to fund terrorism. In case you need a refresher:
Yeah. She's a real piece of work. ...And, like a bad penny, she just keeps turning up. This time her name has appeared at the center of the growing Trump spy scandal. As you're no doubt aware, Trump claims the Obama admin was eavesdropping on his campaign for political purposes. The names of people who were surveilled by the government - but who were not the subject of said surveillance - are supposed to be kept a closely guarded secret. This is referred to as "masking." In at least the case of Michael Flynn, the names were "unmasked" and there are reports that the intel was widely disseminated to anti-Trump operatives and politicians. So, the question becomes, who demanded the "unmasking" of the salient names? Take one guess... From Bloomberg:
White House lawyers last month discovered that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The pattern of Rice's requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government's policy on "unmasking" the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like "U.S. Person One." The National Security Council's senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, was conducting the review, according to two U.S. officials who spoke with Bloomberg View on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. In February Cohen-Watnick discovered Rice's multiple requests to unmask U.S. persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities. He brought this to the attention of the White House General Counsel's office, who reviewed more of Rice's requests and instructed him to end his own research into the unmasking policy. The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations -- primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.
Valuable political information on the Trump transition team? Well, I'll be. That sounds an awful lot like "motive" right there. I could have sworn that the left has been telling us that such a scheme was inconceivable. So far, shocker, Rice has refused to comment on any of this. ..But it's really starting to feel that the "wiretapping" kerfuffle - something Democrats believed was a slam-dunk - is about to blow up in their faces.

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Robert Laurie——

Robert Laurie’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain.com

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