RUTHFULLY YOURS

Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice is once again in the news, embroiled in a growing scandal. Bloomberg News has reported this week that Rice requested or directed the unmasking of the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports, who were involved with the Trump transition team. The communications of these individuals were apparently collected incidentally during the course of electronic monitoring of communications involving foreign officials of interest. Normally, Americans’ identities are masked, with generic references such as the title “U.S. Person One.”

According to Eli Lake’s Bloomberg report, “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.”

Daily Caller has reported that 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,” citing former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova as a source.

Circa has reported that Rice’s snooping actually preceded the election: “Susan Rice accessed numerous intelligence reports during Obama’s last seven months in office that contained National Security Agency intercepts involving Donald Trump and his associates.”

It also appears that the monitoring at issue had little if anything to do with the investigation of Russian interference in the presidential election.

These reports, and others along the same lines, raise serious questions about what Rice was doing with the unmasked identifiable information she obtained access to, even though nothing revealed so far indicates that Rice broke the law. She had the authority to request unmasking under certain circumstances where there was an intelligence need in the interest of national security for such information. But given Rice’s closeness to Obama and concern for preserving his legacy, politics, not national security, was more likely her primary motive.

Michael Doran, former National Security Council senior director, told the Daily Caller 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,” he said.

It is a threat to our electoral democracy if a party in power is able to use the nation’s intelligence apparatus to do opposition research on the party out of power. This is what Rice appears to have done, perhaps to protect her boss’s legacy from being undermined by the new Trump administration. Rice denies all of this, of course.

The thing to bear in mind is that the White House does not do investigations. Not criminal investigations, not intelligence investigations.

Remember that.

Why is that so important in the context of explosive revelations that Susan Rice, President Obama’s national-security adviser, confidant, and chief dissembler, called for the “unmasking” of Trump campaign and transition officials whose identities and communications were captured in the collection of U.S. intelligence on foreign targets?

Because we’ve been told for weeks that any unmasking of people in Trump’s circle that may have occurred had two innocent explanations: (1) the FBI’s investigation of Russian meddling in the election and (2) the need to know, for purposes of understanding the communications of foreign intelligence targets, the identities of Americans incidentally intercepted or mentioned. The unmasking, Obama apologists insist, had nothing to do with targeting Trump or his people.

That won’t wash.

In general, it is the FBI that conducts investigations that bear on American citizens suspected of committing crimes or of acting as agents of foreign powers. In the matter of alleged Russian meddling, the investigative camp also includes the CIA and the NSA. All three agencies conducted a probe and issued a joint report in January. That was after Obama, despite having previously acknowledged that the Russian activity was inconsequential, suddenly made a great show of ordering an inquiry and issuing sanctions.

Consequently, if unmasking was relevant to the Russia investigation, it would have been done by those three agencies. And if it had been critical to know the identities of Americans caught up in other foreign intelligence efforts, the agencies that collect the information and conduct investigations would have unmasked it. Because they are the agencies that collect and refine intelligence “products” for the rest of the “intelligence community,” they are responsible for any unmasking; and they do it under “minimization” standards that FBI Director James Comey, in recent congressional testimony, described as “obsessive” in their determination to protect the identities and privacy of Americans.

Understand: There would have been no intelligence need for Susan Rice to ask for identities to be unmasked. If there had been a real need to reveal the identities — an intelligence need based on American interests — the unmasking would have been done by the investigating agencies.

The national-security adviser is not an investigator. She is a White House staffer. The president’s staff is a consumer of intelligence, not a generator or collector of it. If Susan Rice was unmasking Americans, it was not to fulfill an intelligence need based on American interests; it was to fulfill a political desire based on Democratic-party interests.

The FBI, CIA, and NSA generate or collect the intelligence in, essentially, three ways: conducting surveillance on suspected agents of foreign powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and carrying out more-sweeping collections under two other authorities — a different provision of FISA, and a Reagan-era executive order that has been amended several times over the ensuing decades, EO 12,333.

As Director Comey explained, in answering questions posed by Representative Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), those three agencies do collection, investigation, and analysis. In general, they handle any necessary unmasking — which, due to the aforementioned privacy obsessiveness, is extremely rare. Unlike Democratic-party operatives whose obsession is vanquishing Republicans, the three agencies have to be concerned about the privacy rights of Americans. If they’re not, their legal authority to collect the intelligence — a vital national-security power — could be severely curtailed when it periodically comes up for review by Congress, as it will later this year.

So now it appears that short-lived national security advisor Mike Flynn made speeches before various Russian entities and was paid for it. To those suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome this is further evidence of collusion with the Russians. Collusion to do what is to ever said, though it was probably Putin who kept Hillary from campaigning in Wisconsin, made Debbie Wasserman Schultz sabotage Bernie Sanders, and forced Donna Brazile to leak CNN debate questions to Team Clinton.

Speaking of the Clinton News Network, CNN has been reduced to fact-checking jokes about Team Trump members using Russian dressing on their salads:

Proving that the rabidly partisan journalists at CNN have way too much time on their hands, reporter Michelle Krupa on Wednesday actually fact checked a White House joke about Russian salad dressing. During his daily briefing on Tuesday, Press Secretary Sean Spicer teased, “If the President puts Russian salad dressing on his salad tonight, somehow that’s a Russia connection.”

The humor-challenged CNN sprung into action. On CNN.com, Krupa wrote, “Thing is, Russian dressing isn’t Russian.” Wait for it, here is the devastating bombshell:

The mayo and ketchup concoction — often dressed up with horseradish and spices — was created in Nashua, New Hampshire.

It was grocer James E. Colburn who invented the spread in 1924, according to “New Hampshire Resources, Attractions and Its People, a History,” by Hobart Pillsbury. The Washington Post cites the 1927 text, which says Colburn sold the condiment to “retailers and hotels across the country, earning ‘wealth on which he was enabled to retire.'”

Democracy and our republic are safe. Another Team Trump lie has been exposed. For all the righteous indignation about Michael Flynn’s dealings as a private citizen with Russia, one would have thought he was Bill Clinton, making speeches to foreign entities seeking influence with his Secretary of State wife for ungodly sums while donations poured into the Clinton Foundation from foreign governments and individuals to pay, among other thigs, for Chelsea Clinton’s wedding dress and lifestyle.

One would have thought for all the outrage against Flynn and other members of Team Trump, maybe the chattering class has Flynn confused with John Podesta, the doofus whose password was “password” and may have violated federal disclosure laws for not disclosing he was paid to sit on the board of various Russian entities:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, may have violated federal law when he failed to fully disclose details surrounding his membership on the executive board of Joule Unlimited and the “75,000 common shares” he received. The energy company accepted millions from a Vladimir Putin-connected Russian government fund.

Podesta joined the executive board of Joule Unlimited Technologies — a firm partly financed by Putin’s Russia — in June 2011 and received 100,000 shares of stock options, according to an email uncovered by WikiLeaks. Podesta’s membership on the board of directors of Joule Unlimited was first revealed in research from Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer.