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."
Nunes Says Trump Team Caught in U.S. Surveillance Net
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 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.
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.
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