UPDATE: Read Katie’s post about (fried) Rice saying that she didn’t leak anything. Oh, and she engaged in some unmasking because it was part of her job. That’s uh, quite the change from her PBS interview, where she said she knew nothing about any unmasking.
***
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR),
a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was on the Hugh Hewitt Show this
morning to discuss the latest bombshell development that former National
Security Adviser Susan Rice requested the unmasking of at least one person
involved in Trump's transition team.
Sen. Cotton said that
unmasking is usually done within the parameters of a law enforcement or
intelligence investigation.
Another instance would
be what’s going on in the halls of Congress trying to figure out who is behind
the leaking of classified information, among other things—like the possible
ties between the Trump campaign and Russia that has yet to yield any solid
evidence.
Now, Rice appeared on
the PBS NewsHour in March, where she denied
having any knowledge about Trump officials being under
surveillance—something that Hugh brought up on his show.
“Hugh, Susan Rice is the Typhoid Mary of the Obama
administration foreign policy. Every time something went wrong, she seemed to
turn up in the middle of it, “ said Cotton. “Whether it was these allegations
of improper unmasking and potential improper surveillance—whether it was
Benghazi, or many of the other fiascos over the eight years of the Obama
administration.”
Cotton added that it would be unusual in the ordinary
course of business for anyone to request an unmasking of an American who was
caught through incidental collection on a FISA warrant.
Hewitt asked him if he or anyone on the Senate
Intelligence Committee had pulled the stunt that Susan Rice reportedly did with
these transcripts.
Cotton said no.
He also said that they wouldn’t see the transcript of
intercepts since that’s raw intelligence that’s curated by analysts into a
finished product that’s reviewed by him and his colleagues on the committee.
He said that the only time that they get into the weeds
of this is when there’s an investigation, like this one relating to possible
Trump-Russia ties.
The Arkansas senator also noted that to request an
unmasking would still be a “momentous” decision, given the minimization
protocols that are set in place to protect the privacy of Americans.
The Wall Street
Journal op-ed, which was cited on the show, also poses questions that Cotton
felt are fair within the context of this investigation [emphasis mine]:
A
U.S. intelligence official confirms to us the bombshell news, first reported
Monday by Bloomberg, that Ms. Rice requested the name of at least one Trump
transition official listed in an intelligence report in the months between
Election Day and Donald Trump’s inauguration.
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.
[…]
The
news about Ms. Rice’s unmasking role raises a host of questions for the Senate
and House intelligence committees to pursue.
What
specific surveillance information did Ms. Rice seek and why?
Was
this information related to President Obama’s decision in January to make it
possible for raw intelligence to be widely disbursed throughout the government?
Was
this surveillance of Trump officials “incidental” collection gathered while
listening to a foreigner, or were some Trump officials directly targeted, or
“reverse targeted”?
Also, if Rice had lied on PBS, it wouldn’t be the first
time.
She’s no arbiter of the truth.
She lied to the entire country when she went onto the
Sunday morning talk shows in 2012 and said that the Benghazi attack was a
spontaneous reaction to an inflammatory YouTube video, which turned out to be
total bunk. It was a terrorist attack.
It was pre-planned. And it was executed by affiliates of
al-Qaeda, who were supposedly on the run.
The Obama White House, which had said on the campaign
trail that al-Qaeda was being routed, was in a rather precarious situation of
looking ridiculous.
To make things more ironic, Rice penned an op-ed where
she said that twisting the truth endangers our national security.
Yeah, we sure know that from you, Ms. Rice.
