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.
It was not clear how Rice knew to ask for the names
to be unmasked, but the question was being posed by the sources late
Monday.
"What I know is this ... If the intelligence
community professionals decide that there’s some value, national
security, foreign policy or otherwise in unmasking someone, they will
grant those requests," former Obama State Department spokeswoman and Fox
News contributor Marie Harf told Fox News' Martha MacCallum on "The
First 100 Days. "And we have seen no evidence ... that there was
partisan political notice behind this and we can’t say that unless
there’s actual evidence to back that up."
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.
