Is Susan Rice the Leader or the Fall Guy in the Obama Administration Spying on Trump and his Team?

OBAMA WHITE HOUSE UNMASKED TRUMP TEAM NAMES. Sources have told Fox News that National Security Advisor Susan Rice was the Obama White House insider who requested the unmasking of the names of Trump transition officials. On Monday, Fox published an article by Adam Housley, who reported : "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 everyone at the National Security Council, some at the Defense Department, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-CIA Director John Brennan. These were essentially the officials at the top of the Obama naitonal security network. Susan Rice even included former Rice deputy Ben Rhodes. The names, says Housley, 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." The Fox article does not make clear how Rice knew to ask for the names to be unmasked, and the question was being posed by the sources late Monday. • • • THE OBAMA SPIN BEGINS. We all remember Susan Rice, who was the Ambassador to the UN when she went on Sunday news shows in September 2012 to say the Benghazi attack was prompted by an internet video. And, in 2014, Rice also told ABC News that Army Sergeant 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. • Former Obama State Department spokeswoman and Fox News contributor Marie Harf told Fox : "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. Harf added : "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." • As the Obama administration left office, it also approved new rules that gave the NSA [Susan Rice, for example] much broader powers by relaxing the rules about sharing intercepted personal communications and the ability to share those with 16 other intelligence agencies. When names of Americans are incidentally intercepted, 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. As evidence of this, in March Evelyn Farkas, former Obama Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, gave a television interview in which she said : “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.” • • • HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN NUNES BLOCKED BY INTEL PRO'S. Fox News also reported that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes knew about the 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 told Fox : “the intelligence agencies slow-rolled Nunes. He could [eventually] 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.” According to the Associated Press, Representative Nunes has said he has seen incidental surveillance reports he fears were used for political reasons. But, Nunes has also said : “I’m not going to comment on this any further until [congressional] committees have come to a conclusion,” adding that there is a noticeable difference between the media’s alleged “lack” of interest in these revelations and the intense coverage of suspected Trump-Russia links. • • • SENATOR RAND PAUL CALLS FOR RICE TO TESTIFY UNDER OATH. Former Obama administration National Security Adviser Susan Rice should be grilled under oath about her reported requests to "unmask" Donald Trump associates contained in intelligence reports, according to Senator Rand Paul. The Kentucky GOP Senator called the unmasking of Americans an "enormous deal," accroding to TheHill. Senator Paul told TheHill : "I don't think we should discount how big a deal it was that Susan Rice was looking at these, and she needs to be asked, did President [Barack] Obama ask her to do this? Was this a directive from President Obama? Is there a possibility that Susan Rice was politically motivated? Let's ask her why she was opening up all of the conversations with Trump transition figures." Senator Paul said Rice's testimony should be "under oath on this. I think she should be asked under oath, did she reveal it to the Washington Post," Paul added, referring to the newspaper that first reported on the unmasking requests. Paul said : "I think they were illegally basically using an espionage tool to eavesdrop or wiretap -- if you want to use the word generally -- on the Trump campaign." The explosive report on the Rice unmasking followed House Intelligence Committee's chairman Nunes statements that information was incidentally collected on Trump transition members in foreign surveillance activities and widely disseminated in the intelligence community. Nunes said he was particularly concerned with the possibility Trump associates were "unmasked" in the intelligence reports. Senator Paul said : "I have been very impressed with Devin Nunes. All of the intelligence hawks don't like him because he appears to have found something, and he's willing to talk about it with the President." Paul said the incidental collection on Americans without a warrant "is inappropriate, and it should be illegal. I don't think you should be allowed to listen to Americans' conversations without a warrant. They are doing it without a warrant. They are targeting a foreigner, and because they are targeting a foreigner, they are gathering all of this information on Americans." • • • TRUMP WHITE HOUSE REACTS. House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, asked about the Susan Rice revelations at Monday’s briefing, declined to comment specifically on what role Rice may have played or officials’ motives. But, President Trump was more direct. Through his private Twitter account on Monday, Trump pointed to expanded Fox News coverage concerning electronic surveillance of himself and people close to him, quoting a Fox reporter's assertion that the incidents were unprecedented : "FoxNews from multiple sources: 'There was electronic surveillance of Trump, and people close to Trump. This is unprecedented.' " • Trump was referring to the Adam Housley report on Friday, prior to the Susan Rice revelation, that numerous private citizens connected with President Trump's campaign team had been "unmasked" in intelligence information swept up in "incidental collection," giving further details in his initial report : "There was electronic surveillance of Trump and the people close to Donald Trump, including some supporters, for up to a year before the inauguration," Housley said. "That information was disseminated. It was unprecedented the way this was done." Housley said that it is still not known who spoke with House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes concerning the surveillance, but "we know it's not someone at the White House. We don't know who spoke to the White House about this, other than what Nunes said about the press conference," said Housley, but he added that intelligence sources are "frustrated with the agency they say are being politicized more than they've seen in their career." His sources, Housley continued, "want to make sure it's done correctly," and have told him that they may as well clarify information "since Nunes has been leaked to by someone they don't know or at least they tell me they don't know." • The New York Times last week reported that several sources identified the leakers as Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer who works on national security issues at the White House Counsel's Office, but Housley denied Monday that either man was involved. • Messages involving US citizens are supposed to be removed from reports, but on the Trump reports, the names remained [that is, the names were "unmasked"], and "that is unprecedented," said Housley. "They say the information that was unmasked, these names of Americans who had done nothing wrong, was disseminated to all of the National Security Council, some at the Department of Defense, to [James] Clapper and other people at the top." However, Housley continued, his sources did not know just what papers Nunes saw. But, the fact that the information of unmasking names from Donald Trump and his team and his family and disseminating the names to a very select few at the top, and that it was done for a significant amount of time, is "a blockbuster;" according to Housley, who added, "As far as we know. this hasn't been done at least in modern times when it comes to this type of thing." • Also last Friday, Newsmax reported that NBC News had revealed that officials within former President Barack Obama's administration created a list, using serial numbers, to document all of the classified files related to the Russia-election investigation. The purpose was to get the documents in front of Senate Intelligence Committee members before President Trump took office for fear they might get buried come January 20, according to NBC. A former Obama official told NBC they wanted "to share it with those on the Hill who could lawfully see the documents" and keep them in a second safe outside of CIA headquarters. Newsmax stated that the NBC report "echoes what a former Obama Defense Department official has been saying in recent weeks," quoting DOD Deputy Assistant Secretary Evelyn Farkas, now also a national security analyst for NBC News as well as for Fox News. NBC said Farkas "had urged the Obama administration as well as lawmakers to gather and preserve intelligence about the Trump-Russia probe." Farkas told MSNBC last Thursday : "I got worried that the process wasn't being followed with regard to Capitol Hill, with regard to Congress, because it wasn't clear to me that the [Obama] White House was keeping them in the loop. And that was really important, especially since we were about to have a transition in the government." • • • DEAR READERS, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes had to go to the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House in order to secretly view the classified reports that documented what Nunes had known since January -- that private US citizens had been improperly unmasked. Two intelligence sources had approached Nunes about the unmasking, according to Fox reports, telling him who was responsible and giving him at least one of the names that had been unmasked. The sources also gave Nunes the serial numbers of reports that documented the activity. But when House Intelligence Committee Chairman Nunes asked intelligence agencies to see the reports, he was "stonewalled," Fox reports. Nunes finally viewed the information last week, but at the one location that would not compromise the identities of the sources : the Old Executive Office Building on the White House grounds, where there is a secured area in which classified or similar information can be viewed. The White House did not tell Nunes that the reports existed, only helping him get access to them, the sources told Fox. In addition, the sources were not the Trump White House individuals named in a report by The New York Times last Thursday as helping Nunes obtain the information, according to Fox. Nunes then briefed President Trump on the data, drawing fire from Democrats, including Vice Chairman Representative Adam Schiff, for not providing the information to panel members. Nunes apologized the next day, but said that he briefed Trump because the data had no connection to Russia or its investigation of Moscow's role in the election. • That in itself is a shocking revelation -- that the Chairman of the House Intelligence committee had to go to the White House to see classified doculments he is entitled to see as Chairman is an indication of the Deep State's determination to prevent the Trump administration from functioning and to prevent the GOP House majority from doing its job in getting to the bottom of the Obama misuse of classified information. • FURTHER, the idea that any US President and his national security staff would use classified information for political purposes is an astonishing damnation of President Obama and his renegade advisors. A congressional source told Fox News : "The main issue in this case, is not only the unmasking of these names of private citizens, but the spreading of these names for political purposes that have nothing to do with national security or an investigation into Russia's interference in the US election." • The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) only allows for individuals to be revealed in data collected incidentally when it is critical to the intelligence -- and such information is only collected on US residents who communicate with foreign targets. But in this case, according to a Fox source, the names of private citizens connected to the Trump campaign were revealed, even before Trump became the GOP presidential nominee, and it was not out of national security concerns : "Unmasking is not unprecedented, but unmasking for political purposes...specifically of Trump transition team members...is highly suspect and questionable," Fox said, adding that the intelligence source told Fox : "Opposition by some in the intelligence agencies who were very connected to the Obama and Clinton teams was strong. After Trump was elected, they decided they were going to ruin his presidency by picking them off one by one." • Housley insisted in his Monday report naming Susan Rice as the "unmasker" : “It took, obviously, a number of weeks to try to figure out a way for him [Nunes] to see this intelligence, because the agencies were stonewalling, we’re told, to not allow him and others to see it. This is all coming from folks that are in these agencies and frustrated with the politics that is taking place in these agencies. We’re told that the main issue here is not only the unmasking of the names, but the spreading of names for political purposes that have nothing to do with national security and everything to do with hurting and embarrassing Trump and his team.” Housley added : "...after Nunes had been approached by his source, the agencies basically would not allow him in at all." That is why Nunes went to the White House grounds location to read the classified documentation -- it was the only place he could get access to it. • If this disgusting sequence of quasi-criminal events does not put a fire under the Republican House and Senate Intelligence Committees to get all the facts out -- and if it does not move moderate Democrats over onto the GOP side in the investigation -- then we will have the answer to a critical question : "Are Obama and Progressive Democrats deliberately trying to destroy President Trump, the Republican Party and the American majority who support them? The answer is obviously "YES." It is time for every member of the Grand Old Party to wake up and smell the stench -- it is not roses but swamp miasma and the rotting flesh of corruption that has destroyed a major American political party -- the Democrats -- and if any Democrats are appalled by what their Party represents -- the party of Jackson, who was by the way, a landgrabbing enemy of Native Americans -- it is now time to get busy forming its successor. There is no place in the United States or under its Constitution for the elitism that breeds criminality and destroys the foundations of American Republic. Barack Obama and George Soros and the Clintons, and all their minions, must be brought to the bar of justice for their acts. • As for Susan Rice -- she told PBS on March 22 that she “was not aware of any orders given to disseminate that information,” skirting the issues of whether she herself unmasked or disseminated information outright. Rice also limited her remarks to Trump’s debunked early March tweet claiming a wiretap of Trump Tower and vague remarks made by House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes. Rice said : "I know nothing about this. I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that count today...So today, I really don’t know to what Chairman Nunes was referring. But he said that whatever he was referring to was a legal, lawful surveillance and that it was potentially incidental collection on American citizens.” Rice’s remarks on March 22 focus on the strict legality of the issue -- instead of whether the unmasking was appropriate or of intelligence value. Since Monday's reporting, Rice has remained silent. Whether Susan Rice is once again the pivot in the deliberate dissemination of lies about illicit activiites as in the Benghazi affair, we do not know. Perhaps, she is just the chosen "fall guy" for the latest cover-up of the possibly criminal activities of Obama, Clinton, Soros & Co.