Susan Rice Ordered the Unmasking of the Trump Team

[Jerry Shugart]

Susan Rice ordered unmasking of Trump team in intel, Bloomberg View reports

"Susan Rice, who Newsweek once described as former President Barack Obama’s “right-hand woman,” was at the center of unmasking Trump administration officials, a new report concludes.

Eli Lake, who broke the story for Bloomberg View, wrote on Monday morning: “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. …”

But the process isn’t what matters here — it’s the substance. Mr. Lake’s report confirms Mr. Nunes account: That the Obama administration had collected incidental information on the Trump transition team and that some of the unmasked names had nothing to do with Russia. That the requests for the unmasking came directly from Ms. Rice — someone who was so close to Mr. Obama — is startling.

There are still many unanswered questions. What were the motives of Ms. Rice for collecting this information? Were her requests granted? If so, who did she share the information with? Who leaked the information that lead to the unmasking and then resignation of former National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn? Was this information requested and shared before or after Mr. Trump won the White House? Where Ms. Rice’s requests illegal? Why or why not?

All of this being said, the Trump administration should declassify the report to shed some light on the issue. Although Mr. Trump may not have been wiretapped, it does look as though Mr. Obama’s administration was broadly spying on his incoming administration. And that’s more than worrisome, it’s potentially criminal.
​

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/apr/3/susan-rice-ordered-unmasking-trump-team-intel-bloo/

 

[ok doser]

" Mr. Obama’s administration was broadly spying on his incoming administration. And that’s more than worrisome, it’s potentially criminal."


lock him up!

lock him up!

 

[Nang]

" Mr. Obama’s administration was broadly spying on his incoming administration. And that’s more than worrisome, it’s potentially criminal."


lock him up!



lock him up!

Lock em all up!

 

[annabenedetti]

All of this being said, the Trump administration should declassify the report to shed some light on the issue. Although Mr. Trump may not have been wiretapped, it does look as though Mr. Obama’s administration was broadly spying on his incoming administration. And that’s more than worrisome, it’s potentially criminal.
​

*Gasp!* Oh my goodness, let's assemble a congressional inquiry! Oh wait.... they're busy with Trump's Russia problem...

As a matter of fact this looks like another way of distracting attention from that Trump/Russia problem.

Elsewhere:

As Lake noted in his Monday report, a senior official must believe that there is “some foreign intelligence value” in unmasking a U.S. person’s name, so Rice’s alleged requests were “likely within the law.” The National Security Council reportedly discovered the requests while reviewing how the government decides to unmask the redacted names of U.S. persons who get swept up in legal surveillance of foreign nationals.
Here’s how Lake described the raw intelligence reports in which Trump staffers’ names were unmasked:

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.
​

 

[annabenedetti]

Anatomy of a fake scandal, ginned up by right-wing media and Trump

President Trump started off this morning as he often does, by settling in to watch the festival of nincompoopery that is “Fox & Friends.” On the show, he saw something that he believes vindicates the bizarre and false charge he made that Barack Obama was tapping his phones during the presidential campaign.

I’ll try to sort through the substance of all this. But I also want to make a broader argument about how Trump’s support system — inside his government but especially in the conservative media and on Fox, which is where he apparently gets most of his intelligence information — is playing to his worst instincts, harming him politically, and making his presidency even more dangerous.

Today’s antics all started with a report on “Fox & Friends” in which correspondent Adam Housley reported that a high-ranking Obama administration official had requested the “unmasking” of the names of Trump officials who were caught up in surveillance of foreign targets. Ordinarily, when a U.S. person shows up in such surveillance — say, talking to a Russian ambassador whose communications are being monitored — that person’s identity is blacked out in reports on the surveillance.

While Housley did not identify the Obama administration official, he did say that Trump associates were being picked up by this surveillance for a year before Trump took office.

Then we get this report from Eli Lake, identifying former national security adviser Susan Rice as the Obama official who requested the unmasking. I’d like to highlight this passage:

​

Rice’s requests to unmask the names of Trump transition officials does not vindicate Trump’s own tweets from March 4 in which he accused Obama of illegally tapping Trump Tower. There remains no evidence to support that claim.
But Rice’s multiple requests to learn the identities of Trump officials discussed in intelligence reports during the transition period does highlight a longstanding concern for civil liberties advocates about U.S. surveillance programs. The standard for senior officials to learn the names of U.S. persons incidentally collected is that it must have some foreign intelligence value, a standard that can apply to almost anything. This suggests Rice’s unmasking requests were likely within the law.


​

I’d say that if members of the Trump team were in communication with foreign actors who were under surveillance, that damn sure has “foreign intelligence value,” and it’s not too surprising that the national security adviser would want to know about it. We’re talking about associates of a presidential candidate communicating with representatives of a foreign power.​

 

[Jerry Shugart]

*Gasp!* Oh my goodness, let's assemble a congressional inquiry! Oh wait.... they're busy with Trump's Russia problem...

Trump has no Russia problem. What started the investigation into this matter was an illegal unmasking and an illegal leak and since then absolutely no evidence has been presented that demonstrates that the Trump team colluded with Russia about anything.

Despite the lack of evidence it seems as all the liberals can focus on is something where there is no evidence instead of the evidence found in this investigation that during the Obama administration civil rights were violated. The same thing undercovered during the IRS investigation. And the violation of the Associated Press' civil rights. And the violation of the civil rights of reporter James Rosen. All "likely" within the law.

 

[ok doser]

 

[Jerry Shugart]

Susan Rice Denies Knowledge About the "Unmasking" Scandal​

Just 12 Days ago, Susan Rice appeared on PBS News hour and was asked about the “unmasking” scandal that, today, blew up in her face. Her denial is nothing short of astonishing. If this morning’s Bloomberg report is correct, Susan Rice was the Obama admin official demanding the unmasking of Trump transition team members whose protected identities had been swept up in “incidental” intel collection. ...And yet there she was, less than two weeks ago claiming to know nothing about any of it.​

See the interview here:

http://canadafreepress.com/article/...denied-any-knowledge-of-unmasking-trump-intel

 

[glorydaz]

*Gasp!* Oh my goodness, let's assemble a congressional inquiry! Oh wait.... they're busy with Trump's Russia problem...

As a matter of fact this looks like another way of distracting attention from that Trump/Russia problem.

Of course, it doesn't matter what anyone from the Obama Administration has done, as long as we can keep people distracted with those Russians. :chuckle:

 

[patrick jane]

When will the libtard demoncrats give up on the bogus Russia claims

 

[jgarden]

The accusation against Susan Rice comes from Ezra Cohen-Watnick of the NSA, a Mike Flynn holdover.

National Security Advisor General McMaster, Flynn's replacement, wanted Cohen-Watnick out but apparently political advisors Bannon and Kushner went over McMaster's head to the President and managed to have him retained.

Cohen-Watnick was one of the White House staffers associated with feeding "laundered" intel to Devin Nunes in an effort to provide cover for Trump's unsubstantiated claims after it was refuted by Comey of the FBI.

McMaster's suspicions were correct - Cohen-Watnick has compromised and politicized the NSA by making it Trump's personal intelligence agency.

Nunes was also responsible for cancelling Rice's testimony to the House Committee in open session - if she was the "smoking gun" as Trump supporters assert, why would a prominent member of the President's own Transition Team deliberately suppress it?

 

[jgarden]

When will the libtard demoncrats give up on the bogus Russia claims

The media has discovered yet another 2 Russian connections with Trump surrogates tonight alone!

1. Carter Page - Victor Podobnyy, one of three men charged in connection with a Cold War-style Russian spy ring, tried to recruit Carter Page, an energy consultant working in New York at the time. Page served as a foreign policy adviser to Trump's campaign and admits meeting with the Russian ambassador at the Republican National Convention.

2. Erik Prince - Prince is the brother of Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education in the Trump Administration and founder of Blackwater, the private security firm notorious for its killing of civilians in Iraq. Prince is also closely linked with Steve Bannon and Breitbart News and served as a back-water emissary in January for President-elect Trump for meetings with Russians in the Seychelles.

 

[rexlunae]

There's nothing illegal about the National Security Advisor asking for a name to be unmasked. What is interesting is how right-wing media seem to have picked up that narrative so helpfully.

 

[annabenedetti]

Fact-checking the Trumpian spin on ‘surveillance of Trump’

The Trump White House is determined to turn questions about Russian efforts to sway the presidential election into a probe about whether the Obama administration improperly spied on Trump campaign officials. This line of attack is consistent with President Trump’s March 4 tweets falsely claiming that President Barack Obama tapped his phones at the Trump Tower during the election.

On April 3, Trump seized on a three-day-old report recycled on Fox News — that a “very senior” intelligence official “unmasked,” or exposed, the names of people affiliated with the Trump team — to insist that should be the real focus on the Russia probe. This is entirely different from Trump’s original claim about phone taps during the election, but the White House often acts as if it is similar.

 

[Jerry Shugart]

"After it was revealed over the weekend by Mike Cernovich that Susan Rice was the mysterious Obama official behind the "unmasking" of Trump associates, the details behind the extreme measures taken by the Obama administration, including what seems to be personal legal liability for Susan Rice and potentially others, continue to grow more and more disturbing.

This morning, the Daily Caller has provided new details, courtesy of former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova, suggesting that Rice specifically requested that the NSA provide her with "detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates."

“What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.

“The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.”​

Meanwhile, Retired Colonel James Waurishuk, an NSC veteran and former deputy director for intelligence at the U.S. Central Command, said that the level of coordination required to pull off such a massive spying operation is staggering and would have required numerous personnel from the White House, NSA, CIA, National Security Council, etc.

“The surveillance initially is the responsibility of the National Security Agency,” Waurishuk said. “They have to abide by this guidance when one of the other agencies says, ‘we’re looking at this particular person which we would like to unmask.’”

“The lawyers and counsel at the NSA surely would be talking to the lawyers and members of counsel at CIA, or at the National Security Council or at the Director of National Intelligence or at the FBI,” he said. “It’s unbelievable of the level and degree of the administration to look for information on Donald Trump and his associates, his campaign team and his transition team. This is really, really serious stuff.”​

In other words, it's growing increasingly unlikely that this operation was anything but a direct, targeted attempt of the Obama administration to utilize the full force of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to take down a political adversary.

As Michael Doran points out, if these alleged actions are proven to be accurate then several people within the Obama administration likely committed felonies.

Michael Doran, former NSC senior director, told TheDCNF Monday that “somebody blew a hole in the wall between national security secrets and partisan politics.” This “was a stream of information that was supposed to be hermetically sealed from politics and the Obama administration found a way to blow a hole in that wall.”

Doran charged that potential serious crimes were undertaken because “this is a leaking of signal intelligence.”

“That’s a felony,” he told TheDCNF. “And you can get 10 years for that. It is a tremendous abuse of the system. We’re not supposed to be monitoring American citizens. Bigger than the crime, is the breach of public trust.”

Waurishuk said he was most dismayed that “this is now using national intelligence assets and capabilities to spy on the elected, yet-to-be-seated president.”

“We’re looking at a potential constitutional crisis from the standpoint that we used an extremely strong capability that’s supposed to be used to safeguard and protect the country,” he said. “And we used it for political purposes by a sitting President. That takes on a new precedent.”
​

Of course, just because Obama used the NSA to try and take down Trump doesn't mean that those allegations that he used the IRS to take out Romney supporters in 2012 were true....Scandal-free administration..."​

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-...readsheets-intercepted-phone-calls-trump-team

OK, Who Is Going to Defend These Sleazeballs?

 

[Rusha]

I’d say that if members of the Trump team were in communication with foreign actors who were under surveillance, that damn sure has “foreign intelligence value,” and it’s not too surprising that the national security adviser would want to know about it. We’re talking about associates of a presidential candidate communicating with representatives of a foreign power.

No *if* ... they were. The smell of treason is in the air via courtesy of Trump and as usual, he will continue to lie and throw mud because his party is willing to put politics above national security.

 

[annabenedetti]

No *if* ... they were. The smell of treason is in the air via courtesy of Trump and as usual, he will continue to lie and throw mud because his party is willing to put politics above national security.

:up:

 

[annabenedetti]

Mike Cernovich

Mike Cernovich? Mike Cernovich?!

Comet Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich who was "widely criticized, having also promoted the beliefs that "date rape does not exist," "misogyny gets you laid," and black women should be "slut shame[d]" to prevent them from getting AIDS?"

Cernovich’s allegiance to the “alt-right,” a self-descriptor for a faction of the white nationalist movement, has been repeatedly documented. In 2015 he explained, “I went from libertarian to alt-right after realizing tolerance only went one way and diversity is code for white genocide.” Additionally, in a series of since-deleted tweets, Cernovich declared that “white genocide is real” and “white genocide will sweep up the [social justice warriors].” Cernovich also traffics in sexist rhetoric, having claimed that “date rape does not exist” and “misogyny gets you laid" and said that people who "love black women" should "slut shame them” to keep them from getting AIDS.

Cernovich has also helped popularize numerous conspiracy theories, including the “Pizzagate” story that claimed an underground child sex trafficking ring was run out of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor and involved top Democratic officials. Despite widespread debunking, Cernovich recently claimed that the restaurant was a place "where a lot of pedophiles meet." He often uses conspiracy theories to weaponize his social media following against his critics, such as when he baseless claimed satirical video editor Vic Berger was a pedophile after Berger published videos mocking Cernovich.​

OK, Who Is Going to Defend [this] Sleazeball?

Who would defend Mike Cernovich?!

:rotfl:

 

[patrick jane]

The media has discovered yet another 2 Russian connections with Trump surrogates tonight alone!

1. Carter Page - Victor Podobnyy, one of three men charged in connection with a Cold War-style Russian spy ring, tried to recruit Carter Page, an energy consultant working in New York at the time. Page served as a foreign policy adviser to Trump's campaign and admits meeting with the Russian ambassador at the Republican National Convention.

2. Erik Prince - Prince is the brother of Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education in the Trump Administration and founder of Blackwater, the private security firm notorious for its killing of civilians in Iraq. Prince is also closely linked with Steve Bannon and Breitbart News and served as a back-water emissary in January for President-elect Trump for meetings with Russians in the Seychelles.

You don't know the difference between collusion with Russia to change our election and obscure ancient connections between US citizens and Russians. It's a small world dummy

 

[Jerry Shugart]

Mike Cernovich? Mike Cernovich?!

I am not defending him but if you are trying to undermine what he wrote then you must also undermine Bloomberg and the New York Times because that is where he got his story:

But, as it turns out, Cernovich didn't need a 'deep throat' within the NSA or CIA for his blockbuster scoop, all he needed was some well-placed sources inside of a couple of America's corrupt mainstream media outlets. As Cernovich explains below, his sources for the Susan Rice story were actually folks working at Bloomberg and the New York Times who revealed that both Eli Lake (Bloomberg) and Maggie Haberman (NYT) were sitting on the Susan Rice story in order to protect the Obama administration.​

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-03/cernovich-explains-how-he-learned-about-susan-rice​

The reporters from Bloomberg and the New York Times knew that these facts will be extremely damaging to the Obama Administration so they were sitting on the story in order to protect the sleazeballs.

And now you are doing your best to try to protect the same sleazeballs!