YO, CNN: Susan Rice’s ‘Unmasking’ Was ILLEGAL — Is THAT News?
We have been inundated with prevarications from Dems and a strident media that is out to pillory the Trump administration in a rabid attempt to strangle it in its infancy. For a nation that loves abortions, this shameless attempt to commit one against a fledgling presidency is unprecedented in our nation’s history.
The overwhelming blather about the Trump campaign’s “Russia connections” remains front page above the fold every day. So here are a few simple excerpts from a recent article that clarify why Susan Rice’s actions can only be described as politically motivated, and are both criminal and indefensible. [Susan Rice’s White House Unmasking: A Watergate-style Scandal; Andrew C. McCarthy}. It will help you respond to those who keep parroting the media with cogent facts…something the media abandoned long ago.
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.
Consequently, if unmasking was relevant to the Russia investigation, it would have been done by those three agencies.
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.
To summarize: 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.
So there you have it. Susan Rice acted outside of her role as National Security Advisor, as did other Obama and Clinton operatives. They pushed classified and private intelligence information out to irresponsible sources, in order to compromise Trump and his people.
This is illegal. The press has ignored the facts once again, but now you know.
Image: by Donkey Hotey; CC by 2.0; https://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/8211082183