Top
Obama Adviser Sought Names of Trump Associates
in Intel
By Eli Lake
April 04,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Bloomberg"
- White House lawyers last month learned 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.
Rice
did not respond to an email seeking comment on
Monday morning. Her role in requesting the
identities of Trump transition officials adds an
important element to the dueling investigations
surrounding the Trump White House since the
president's inauguration.
Both
the House and Senate intelligence committees are
probing any ties between Trump associates and a
Russian influence operation against Hillary
Clinton during the election. The chairman of the
House intelligence committee, Representative
Devin Nunes, is also investigating how the Obama
White House kept tabs on the Trump transition
after the election through unmasking the names
of Trump associates incidentally collected in
government eavesdropping of foreign officials.
Rice herself has not spoken directly on the
issue of unmasking. Last month when she was
asked on the "PBS NewsHour" about reports that
Trump transition officials, including Trump
himself, were swept up in incidental
intelligence collection,
Rice said: "I
know nothing about this," adding, "I was
surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on
that account today."
Rice's requests to unmask the names of Trump
transition officials do 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.
|
No
Advertising - No Government Grants - This Is Independent Media
|
The news about Rice also
sheds light on the strange behavior of Nunes in the last two weeks.
It emerged last week that he traveled to the White House last month,
the night before he made an explosive allegation about Trump
transition officials caught up in incidental surveillance. At the
time he said he needed to go to the White House because the reports
were only on a database for the executive branch. It now appears
that he needed to view computer systems within the National Security
Council that would include the logs of Rice's requests to unmask
U.S. persons.
The ranking Democrat on the
committee Nunes chairs, Representative Adam Schiff, viewed these
reports on Friday. In comments to the press over the weekend he
declined to discuss the contents of these reports, but also said it
was highly unusual for the reports to be shown only to Nunes and not
himself and other members of the committee.
Indeed, much about this is
highly unusual: if not how the surveillance was collected, then
certainly how and why it was disseminated.
Eli Lake is a Bloomberg View
columnist. He was the senior national security correspondent for the
Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the
Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.
This column does not
necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg
LP and its owners.
To contact the author of
this story:
Eli Lake at
elake1@bloomberg.net
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
Susan Rice Ordered Spy
Agencies To Produce ‘Detailed Spreadsheets’ Involving Trump:
Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice ordered U.S. spy
agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal phone calls
involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for
president
White House logs indicate Susan Rice consumed
unmasked intel on Trump associatesby Sara Carter and John Solomon:
Susan Rice accessed numerous intelligence reports during Obama's
last seven months in office that contained National Security Agency
intercepts involving Donald Trump
