Things aren’t looking so great for Susan Rice… and it’s about freaking time!
Susan Rice, Obama’s former National Security Advisor, and Grade A Certified Liar, is on the hot seat.
She was on PBS to clutch her pearls about Devin Nunes assertions that the members of the Trump Team members were ‘unmasked’ after they had been caught in the surveillance of foreign agents.
And a couple of weeks later, she’s on MSNBC ‘clarifying’ her lies comments on PBS.
She implicitly acknowledged and explicitly defended unmasking (the revealing of names within the intelligence community of U.S. citizens gathered in foreign surveillance) by claiming: “It was not uncommon. It was necessary at times to make those requests.”
But speaking to PBS on March 22, Rice denied any knowledge of such unmasking after it was revealed by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif.
She told PBS, “I know nothing about this,” and “I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that count today.”
So, by her own admission, Rice was not telling the truth on March 22…
…Former Congresswoman and House Intelligence Committee member Michele Bachmann did not mince words in estimating the severity of Rice’s actions.
She told WND, “What Susan Rice did is 1,000 times worse than Watergate.”
“Rice clearly pursued a political witch hunt to defeat a Trump presidency,” declared Bachmann…
….Bachmann told WND what Rice did was so much worse than Watergate because she abused her position as “the head of the National Security Council, the top person in the U.S. government tasked with securing the safety of the American people, and the domestic and global interests of the U.S.”
And the abuse was that she “asked U.S. government employees in the intel agencies to reveal the specific identities of those in the Trump campaign scooped up in incidental intelligence gathering, a directive never known to have been given before by an NSC director.”…
…She saw Rice’s political abuse of her office as not atypical of the Obama administration. And she doubted Rice acted alone.
“Just as IRS employee Lois Lerner likely did not act alone persecuting mostly conservative taxpayers,” Bachmann told WND, “it strains credulity to think Susan Rice ordered this breathtaking assault on our political system unilaterally without conversations with Valerie Jarrett, President Obama’s senior most adviser, and/or President Obama himself.”…
…The unmasked names were reportedly sent to every member of the National Security Council, former Rice deputy Ben Rhodes, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, then-CIA Director John Brennan and some officials at the Defense Department.
“Rice, Jarrett, Obama, Ben Rhodes – it would seem it’s time for them to lawyer up – on their own dime,” Bachmann warned. “Just like they’ve forced so many of their political opponents to do by perverting the justice department into a tool of political oppression.”
Read more: World Net Daily
Andrew McCarthy, former Federal prosecutor with a sharp legal mind, wrote an article for National Review that lays out why this is so incredibly bad for Susan Rice.
Here are the 3 main takeaways from McCarthy’s article, Susan Rice’s White House Unmasking: A Watergate-style Scandal
1. Susan Rice called for the ‘unmasking’ of Trump associates caught in surveillance — but that’s not her job. This was Political encroachment into Law Enforcement.
McCarthy explains clearly that the White House is a consumer of information, not a collector of it. The FBI, CIA, and NSA do the collecting as well as determining what should be unmasked. They then issue a report that is sent to White House officials to act on. Therefore, there was no intelligence need for Rice to request the unmasking. It was a political move.
‘Consequently, if unmasking was relevant to the Russia investigation, it would have been done by those three agencies,’ wrote McCarthy.
It’s similar to what Obama did when he weaponized the IRS to target Tea Party groups.
But much, much worse.
2. Rice’s motive to unmask those in Trump’s circle was to disseminate the names widely.
McCarthy states,‘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.’
Rice is not a complete idiot and likely knew who those people caught up in surveillance were already. She didn’t need the names unmasked to help her ‘understand’ what was going on with foreign targets. She just wanted those lower down the chain to see them. And perhaps spread them… to the Media (D).
Remember, Obama relaxed the rules so that intelligence could be spread around to 16 agencies.
McCarthy asks, ‘It appears very likely that Susan Rice was involved in the unmasking of Michael Flynn. Was she also monitoring the FBI’s investigation? Was she involved in the administration’s consideration of (bogus) criminal charges against Flynn? With the subsequent decision to have the FBI interrogate Flynn (or “grill” him, as the Times put it)?’
3. When combined with Evelyn Farkas’s recent admission, it’s pretty damning.
ClashDaily reported on Farkas saying that, after joining Hillary’s campaign, she was encouraging her former colleagues to collect all the intelligence that they could get their hands on.
‘That’s why you have all the leaking,’ concluded Farkas.
Again from McCarthy’s article, ‘Put this in context: Farkas had left the Obama administration in 2015, subsequently joining the presidential campaign of, yes, Hillary Clinton — Trump’s opponent. She told MSNBC that she had been encouraging her former Obama-administration colleagues and members of Congress to seek “as much information as you can” from the intelligence community.‘
McCarthy concludes:
At a high level, officials like Susan Rice had names unmasked that would not ordinarily be unmasked. That information was then being pushed widely throughout the intelligence community in unmasked form . . . particularly after Obama, toward the end of his presidency, suddenly — and seemingly apropos of nothing — changed the rules so that all of the intelligence agencies (not just the collecting agencies) could have access to raw intelligence information. As we know, the community of intelligence agencies leaks like a sieve, and the more access there is to juicy information, the more leaks there are.
Meanwhile, former Obama officials and Clinton-campaign advisers, like Farkas, were pushing to get the information transferred from the intelligence community to members of Congress, geometrically increasing the likelihood of intelligence leaks.
It looks like Susan Rice’s propensity to lie has gotten her in a whole lot of trouble this time.
She probably wishes she could just blame it on a YouTube video.
