Susan Rice requested to
unmask names of Trump transition officials, sources say, by Adam Housley, 4/3/17, FoxNews
Multiple sources tell Fox News that
Susan Rice, former national security adviser under then-President Barack Obama,
requested to unmask the names of Trump transition officials caught up in surveillance.
The unmasked names, of people
associated with Donald Trump, were then sent to all those at the National
Security Council, some at the Defense Department, then-Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper and then-CIA Director John Brennan – essentially,
the officials at the top, including former Rice deputy Ben Rhodes.
The names were part of incidental
electronic surveillance of candidate and President-elect Trump and people close
to him, including family members, for up to a year before he took office.
White House Press Secretary Sean
Spicer, asked about the revelations at Monday’s briefing, declined to comment
specifically on what role Rice may have played or officials’ motives.
“I’m not going to comment on this
any further until [congressional] committees have come to a conclusion,” he
said, while contrasting the media’s alleged “lack” of interest in these
revelations with the intense coverage of suspected Trump-Russia links.
When names of Americans are
incidentally collected, they are supposed to be masked, meaning the name or
names are redacted from reports – whether it is international or domestic
collection, unless it is an issue of national security, crime or if their
security is threatened in any way. There are loopholes and ways to unmask
through backchannels, but Americans are supposed to be protected from
incidental collection. Sources told Fox News that in this case, they were not.
This comes in the wake of Evelyn
Farkas’ television interview last month in which the former Obama deputy
secretary of defense said in part: “I was urging my former colleagues and,
frankly speaking, the people on the Hill – it was more actually aimed at
telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can, get as much
intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration.”
Meanwhile, Fox News also is told
that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes knew about unmasking and
leaking back in January, well before President Trump’s tweet in March alleging
wiretapping.
Nunes has faced criticism from
Democrats for viewing pertinent documents on White House grounds and announcing
their contents to the press. But sources said “the intelligence agencies
slow-rolled Nunes. He could have seen the logs at other places besides the
White House SCIF [secure facility], but it had already been a few weeks. So he
went to the White House because he could protect his sources and he could get
to the logs.”
As the Obama administration left
office, it also approved new rules that gave the NSA much broader powers by
relaxing the rules about sharing intercepted personal communications and the
ability to share those with 16 other intelligence agencies.
Rice is no stranger to controversy.
As the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, she appeared on several Sunday news shows to
defend the adminstration's later debunked claim that the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks
on a U.S. consulate in Libya was triggered by an Internet video.
Rice also told ABC News in 2014 that
Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl "served the United States with honor and
distinction" and that he "wasn't simply a hostage; he was an American
prisoner of war captured on the battlefield." Bergdahl is currently facing court-martial on charges of desertion and misbehavior before the
enemy for allegedly walking off his post in Afghanistan.
Adam
Housley joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in 2001 and currently serves as a Los
Angeles-based senior correspondent.
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