Constitutional Law, Criminal law, Media, Politics, Uncategorized

“I Know Nothing About This”: Rice Accused Of Ordering Unmasking Of Trump Aides and Then Lying About Her Knowledge [UPDATED]

Susan_Rice,_official_State_Dept_photo_portrait,_2009donald_trump_president-elect_portrait_croppedI have written about my mixed views of coverage of President Donald Trump. On one hand, he has caused much of the negative coverage with sensational and insulting tweets — as well as unforced errors by his White House staff.  On the other hand, I have never seen more biased coverage by some major outlets which fail to offer counterarguments in favor of Trump or ignore developments supporting his claims.  The recent disclosure that the unmasking of Trump aides may have been ordered by President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice is a case in point.  The most recent story was published by Bloomberg News. The startling disclosure was all but ignored by major outlets and networks or given only passing attention.  As I have said on air, the unmasking allegation is a serious one and it is made all the more serious by the denials of Rice that she had any knowledge of any unmasking. [Update:  Rice has gone on air and, while refusing to address the requests to unmask these individuals, she insisted that such requests are not unusual and, if done, were not done for political purposes.  She did not deny that she was indeed the person asking for the unmasking of the individuals.]

The story emerging suggests the White House learned last month that Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports involving Trump staff inadvertently intercepted.  There were reportedly dozens of such requests, suggesting a comprehensive and ongoing effort to unmask aides.  That would constitute a serious privacy abuse and raise troubling questions about the use of intelligence operations for political purposes.

The National Security Council’s senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, reportedly discovered Rice’s multiple requests to unmask U.S. persons and raised it with the White House.

U.S. Signals Intelligence Directive (Section 18) only allows unmasking of the identity of U.S persons when it is essential to national security. The question is why the identity of Trump aides satisfied this standard if there was no evidence (as has been reported) of collusion.  Nevertheless, this intent standard is difficult to violate absent a confession or incriminating statement.

However, just last month, Rice  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.”

That would seem to magnify the importance of the story. Yet, it has received relatively little attention on some networks.  It raises past concerns with media largely ignoring proven lies from Democratic officials like James Clapper.  Rice should be given the right to respond and deny these accusations, but there should be greater media interest in the answer.  CNN however has called claims under that story “demonstrably untrue” while others on the network have openly dismissed it as news.  Why? I can understand demanding further proof but this seems a legitimate and important news story. It is certainly for civil libertarians long concerned with unmasking by intelligence officials.

Fox News has reported that unmasked names of Trump aides were given to officials at the National Security Council (NSC), the Department of Defense, James Clapper, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, and John Brennan, Obama’s CIA Director.  However, Clapper has also denied any such knowledge. I have previously written about Clapper’s emergence as a reliable witness in this controversy.

It seems impossible for some reporters to admit that Trump might have been partially right about surveillance and that the Obama Administration might have committed serious privacy violations.  The facts still need to be established but there remains troubling questions raised by these reports.

In her only public statement, there was no effort to press Rice on her earlier denial of knowing anything about any unmasking of aides.  Now she says such unmasking was routine and confidently denies that it involved political motivations.  By the way, there still remains how this routine practice threatens not just privacy but she would have likely known that these were political opponents.  Rice returned to the same parsing of words of “wiretap” — a point that I have previously criticized.

233 thoughts on ““I Know Nothing About This”: Rice Accused Of Ordering Unmasking Of Trump Aides and Then Lying About Her Knowledge [UPDATED]”

  1. https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/when_government_evil_triumphs_freedom_falls

    “It was Thomas Jefferson who warned, “In questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

    Unfortunately, as Carl Sagan recognized, “If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

    How do you fight evil? Start by recognizing it. Talk about it. Refuse to play politics with your principles. Don’t settle for the lesser of two evils. Stop being apathetic.

    As British statesman Edmund Burke warned, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men [and women] to do nothing.””

    We’ve been sold a bill of goods…and we’ve been bamboozled.

  2. Establishment Dems no policies – sexism, racism Evan Maher is coming around

    1. Great clip, Autumn. Dems are doubling down on a loser tactic, that being playing victim. Anyone can make fun of anyone’s hair but a black woman. Shit..Chris Rock made a poignant and funny documentary about black women’s hair. Trump’s hair, Biden’s hair, etc all OK, but that freakin’ clown Maxine Waters is off limits!! And the exchange w/ the black woman reporter happens ALL THE TIME w/ male and female reporters. This victimology helped elect Trump and if these idiots keep doubling down on stupid it will re-elect him.

    1. Thank you. I was glad you pointed out there was no way Paul could claim he knew what was true.

      So the Erik Prince story is more anonymous officials claiming X. The Rice story has a name attached to it along with documents people can look at. Right now, I’ll go with the Rice story having accuracy and the Prince story is probably propaganda, but a possibility.

      What do you think is going on? It seems like both Trump and Obama/Clinton/IC forces are at odds, but are they? The IC seems firmly in place, held there by both by “sides” of what appears to be a dispute. (I’m not certain if it is though.)

      1. Let me give your questions some thought, Jill. (Work beckons.)

        I do know this to be true (in general) — your words:

        “The IC seems firmly in place, held there by both by “sides”…”

        I also know that we’re in one hell of a mess.

      2. https://theintercept.com/2017/04/05/intercepted-podcast-trumps-secret-little-prince/

        “ERIK PRINCE IS the most infamous mercenary in modern U.S. history. The Blackwater founder has also served as Donald Trump’s shadow adviser and secret emissary. This week on Intercepted, an exclusive interview with Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who has fought a decadeslong battle against Erik Prince. Host Jeremy Scahill, who wrote the book on Blackwater, analyzes the news that Prince established a back channel for Trump and Vladimir Putin and, as Trump meets with China’s leader at Mar-a-Lago, outlines Prince’s latest venture with Beijing. On the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s militant speech against the Vietnam War, television host and author Tavis Smiley talks about the “Santa Clausification” of Dr. King and explains why he would not be allowed to speak at his own memorial events today. Rep. Barbara Lee reflects on her own historic speech, delivered three days after 9/11, when she was the only member of Congress to oppose the blank check given to Bush and Cheney to wage an unchecked war on the world. And Vice President Mike Pence, who says he can’t be alone in a room with a woman who is not his wife, gets the Norman Bates treatment.

        “Transcript coming soon.”

  4. We seem as far away from learning whether there actually was “collusion” between the Trump people and Putin than ever, and Trump is winning because he knows how to play the media. His Obama “wiretap” tweet was a perfect Trump ploy. Now the issue of collusion is forever mixed with whether the Obama “deep state” unlawfully spied on the Trump team. The congressional hearings will drown in that question.

    Every new “revelation” of secret inquiries by O’s people – as with Susan Rice – will consume more media oxygen for days, until the next one. Of course, the anti-Trump moles will frantically leak their own “revelations” too, but they won’t have a chance.

    It looks more and more that the three ongoing official investigations of collusion – as well as the media crusade for the Holy Grail (impeachment) – will wind up being one big shrug.

  5. Democrats and progressives do a disservice to this country by existing….period.

    1. Not so. There are good people everywhere and bad people everywhere. Getting rid of people you don’t like is the ultimate form of “safe spacing”! We need to stop seeing in black and white and work together against lies. We can’t work for the common good while seeing everyone as the enemy and being unable to tolerate others who are different from us.

  6. If Susan Rice did any of this, it was just a spontaneous response to a video.
    We need to find and arrest the maker of the video!!

  7. Here is another interesting angle on this story, from the guy who first published it:

    Ever since Mike Cernovich dropped the bombshell report over the weekend outing Obama’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, as the person behind the unmasking of the identity of various members of Trump’s team who were ‘incidentally’ surveilled during the 2016 campaign (see “Confirmed: Susan Rice “Unmasked” Trump Team”), a report which was subsequently confirmed by Eli Lake of Bloomberg earlier this morning, everyone has been wondering who within the Trump White House or the intelligence community supplied him with such a massive scoop.

    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.

    “Maggie Haberman had it. She will not run any articles that are critical of the Obama administration.”

    “Eli Lake had it. He didn’t want to run it and Bloomberg didn’t want to run it because it vindicates Trump’s claim that he had been spied upon. And Eli Lake is a ‘never Trumper.’ Bloomberg was a ‘never Trump’ publication

    “I’m showing you the politics of ‘real journalism’. ‘Real journalism’ is that Bloomberg had it and the New York Times had it but they wouldn’t run it because they don’t want to run any stories that would make Obama look bad or that will vindicate Trump. They only want to run stories that make Trump look bad so that’s why they sat on it.”

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

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

  9. “It seems impossible for some reporters to admit that Trump might have been partially right about surveillance”. But that’s not what Trump said in his infamous Saturday morning tweets. He talked about “wire taps” (only once in quotes) and that President Obama had ordered phones in Trump Tower wiretapped. That is a HUGE difference between Trump campaign/transition officials communications being picked up in surveillance of foreign officials. What Trump tweeted is not even “partially” correct.

    1. “What Trump tweeted is not even “partially” correct.”

      You can’t possibly know what is true and what isn’t.

    2. Kindly explain the difference in 120 words or less sir. Inquiring minds would like to know these fine points that you parrot.

  10. Two MSM reporters held this story. Why is that acceptable?

    “Legal” or illegal, the surveillance state is a nightmare which must be dismantled. Making the illegal, “legal” has been a special gift of Obama. This task started before him, but with his adoring supporters on board all the way, his was a task made easy and unquestioned.

    I notice that Trump is not dismantling mass surveillance. He is embracing it. I am hoping his adoring supporters stop adoring him, stop being his fanboys and girls and start demanding he get moving on protecting everyone’s rights as delineated in this nation’s Constitution.

    1. anon,

      Do you even read the original Snowden or wikileaks documents? The Obama administration did the same thing. This problem didn’t just start on Jan 20, 2017 and I really think Democrats do a disservice to our nation by pretending this crap is something new and different.

      Democrats, by and large, have only become upset about horrific wrongdoing because they have been taught to see it when Trump does it. For years, Dems were taught not to see anything and to make certain to hate and attack any person who pointed out the reality of their beloved tyrant.

      As a nation, we need citizens who are able to see the truth instead of falling for propaganda and making certain that anyone who points out the truth is silenced! Thank you for your service!

        1. Yep, congress passed it, Trump signed it. Truth is, it’s been going on for a long time now, even under Obama Jesus and gasp, before Obama Jesus! It’s just “legal” now.

    2. If you read this blog regularly you would know that Donna Brazille is the worst criminal around. Flynn has nothing on her .:)

        2. enigmain,
          You’ll need to be more specific. Flynn has had a long career, what behavior are you referring to?

          1. Being an undisclosed agent for Turkey while working with the campaign. Taking unreported payments from multiple Russian organizations. Meeting with and Russian officials on more than one occasion and lying about it.

            1. Then you will be surprised indeed to find many on this blog that do not support ANY illegal activity. In my experience here, these people are not Democrats or Republicans first. Perhaps after you’ve been here awhile you’d recognize them.

              1. Yes I’d be shocked in fact. My observation is that any amount of illegal activity is ignored here based on a partisan point of view. While the majority of the people here have let’s say right leanings (not necessarily Republican). Those on the left are just as capable of waiving some pesky illegalities that disrupt their message.

                They often dismiss any illegality by denying that it exists, (e.g. voter suppression, violation of civil rights). They point to justification of some sort. Despite this blog being based on a discussion of the law. Illegal activity with a partisan purpose is quite acceptable.

                1. “They often dismiss any illegality by denying that it exists, (e.g. voter suppression, violation of civil rights).”

                  That’s a perfect example of what is taking place. You use the phrase “voter suppression” and that immediately puts those that want EVERY vote to be legitimate on the defensive. In reality, election integrity should be a universally accepted idea. If voter ID leads to that and all objections to it have a solution, then everyone wins. Isn’t that a reasonable compromise?

                  1. Voter ID (if actually free and not a defacto poll tax) doesn’t bother me. It’s the screen for passing a slew of other laws in conjunction that have nothing to do with preventing already almost non-existent fraud. But wholly intended to reduce particular sets of voters from voting in as great numbers in a desire to change election results. Let’s assume I agreed with the Voter ID aspect. All the rest are designed to win elections and are consistently being found unconstitutional and of course… illegal.

                    1. enigma – we have Voter ID in Arizona, it can only be used for state and local elections. However, they are held at the same time as federal elections. It was the screwiest decision I ever read, but it held up.

                    2. It’s reasonable to distrust the motivations and frankly I would be concerned if there weren’t any concerns. We should always be on guard to the abuses that will happen when people let down their guard. By the way, those abuses of our election process are done across the political spectrum.

        3. Pray tell: what in the world does that have to do with the subject of this post by Jonathon Turley? Or is this just some sort of ad hominem attack in your mind?

          This post is about possible illegal surveillance dude…… Your comment is same as say “the b#& asked for the rape!”

      1. Anon, I would have much more appreciation for your responses if you used your own words as opposed to someone else’s post or heaven forbid a meme. If I respond with a blog post it will be one I wrote myself.

        1. I prefer the tweets at this point because I don’t have the info that the professionals do and especially so when it comes to Russiagate and the pertinet investigations.

          1. I encourage you to learn the information for yourself. “The professionals” are often the very purveyors of fake news, making honest conversation hard to come my. Of course any of us including myself can be wrong. Only by having sorted through the information and reaching your own conclusion can you do more than parrot others.

  14. We already know that Rice is a liar, so this just compounds it. What is one more lie added to the pile?

  15. A good can come out of this evil. I have long said this raw intelligence is way too tempting for corrupt politicians. We need to dismantle the NSA. Increase human intelligence and do away w/ raw data collection.

  17. Imagine if this was a Bush WH official doing this to undermine the incoming Obama Administration.

  18. Rice is a true believer, compulsive liar, errand girl, and a disgrace to this country. I guess we know woman are becoming equals because powerful men used to just have errand boys, now they also have errand girls.

    1. ”now they also have errand girls.”

      A friend of mine refers to these as “service class of women”. And my friend, who is a woman (as am I), is RIGHT. Hardly a desirable position, and yet women, too many, appear fine with it. Never could stand Rice, a hardliner on our wars… and I did derive some delight how Obama and Hillary hung her out to dry on Benghazi, sending her around in the days and weeks following with their made up stories.

  20. One of the reasons that so many of us (from both the right and the left) read Prof. Turley is that the MSM gives biased news (some might argue that they lie by omission).

    The MSM continues to lose relevance in a world where we have alternatives.

    1. I think Chiguy31 is correct, as is Professor Turley. Of course the NSA was listening. They listen to everything. If not in the present then later. That does not excuse the Idiot-In-Chief from making an accusation such as he did, and offer no proof. Unless you want to create a diversion. Which he is trying and not succeeding at. I deplored our choices for President this year as I found them both to be nothing but corrupt and greedy. But more and more it’s showing that Trump is beyond greedy. That he is criminally corrupt, dangerous, and I predict this collusion with the Russians will eventually give him his walking papers. If Paul Ryan were ‘House of Cards’ smart, he’d be all over this. He takes over after Pence.

      1. Tim, You agree the MSM reporting is biased and willfully distorted, you agree the executive branch abused it’s power by using intelligence services to spy on political opponents. Yet you contend, “That does not excuse [Trump] from making an accusation?” Really? You think it is actually worse to blow the whistle on corruption without having had a grand jury hearing first? I think your comment shows just how delusional the rabid anti-Trumpians have become! They (and you) are becoming a clear and present danger to democracy in the United States. Yet you offer – without evidence – that our commander in chief is “criminally corrupt, dangerous” and “colluding with the Russians!?” Very sad.

    2. I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand, the OoP needs to either put up or shut up. He has caused most of his own misery. The in office fighting where most folks are afraid of the person above them, as well as the mystery that surrounds all of the political appointments in constant contact with Russian officials. The list is enigmatic of the disease within.

      Then you have a former political appointe I guess leaking information on one hand is truthful but on the other hand is damaging to the OoP, where would we get the truth from?

      Do you expect the OoP to give us the Truth? I expect the normalcy for the OoP is to lie first defend later. He does this on a regular basis.

      The fight he is setting up with the Freedom Caucus is symbolic of The OoPs inabilities to grasp the importance of civility. Then you have The OoP claiming any news that does not agree with his assertions is classified as Fake News. Then think about this, if The OoP had only its side published would we live in a land of Fake News? There has to be a balance. The OoP has no such clue as to being balanced. He has run his operations like this. He throws a smoke bomb in the place and then comes in and takes the disheveled hostage and promotes the idea of the surviving personal.

      His behavior is affecting the entire country as well as the world. He has no clue how to manage the OoP and is creating a constant conflict in the office, politics and the world.

      He also needs to balance his books with CREW. He needs to provide an accurate accounting of his personal business dealings. He also needs to discuss and disclose the amendments to his Trust that was set up before he took the OoP that allows him to make in undisclosed withdrawals and what is happening with the proceeds. If it were anyone else the answers would be given.

      Lastly, he needs to explain the Comey agreement and his Russian ties.

      The OoP cannot expect legitimacy when he started the Birther movement and complained about Obamas golfing. The list is long. How many campaign promises has the OoP broken?

      Why is his Son in law brokering deals in the Mideast? The list can go in and on.

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