Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova.
“What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.
“The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.”
Other official sources with direct knowledge and who requested anonymity confirmed to TheDCNF diGenova’s description of surveillance reports Rice ordered one year before the 2016 presidential election.
Also on Monday, Fox News and Bloomberg News, citing multiple sources reported that Rice had requested the intelligence information that was produced in a highly organized operation. Fox said the unmasked names of Trump aides were given to officials at the National Security Council (NSC), the Department of Defense, James Clapper, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, and John Brennan, Obama’s CIA Director.
Joining Rice in the alleged White House operations was her deputy Ben Rhodes, according to Fox.
Critics of the atmosphere prevailing throughout the Obama administration’s last year in office point to former Obama Deputy Defense Secretary Evelyn Farkas who admitted in a March 2 television interview on MSNBC that she “was urging my former colleagues,” to “get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration.”
Farkas sought to walk back her comments in the weeks following: “I didn’t give anybody anything except advice.”
Col. (Ret.) James Waurishuk, an NSC veteran and former deputy director for intelligence at the U.S. Central Command, told TheDCNF that many hands had to be involved throughout the Obama administration to launch such a political spying program.
“The surveillance initially is the responsibility of the National Security Agency,” Waurishuk said. “They have to abide by this guidance when one of the other agencies says, ‘we’re looking at this particular person which we would like to unmask.'”
“The lawyers and counsel at the NSA surely would be talking to the lawyers and members of counsel at CIA, or at the National Security Council or at the Director of National Intelligence or at the FBI,” he said. “It’s unbelievable of the level and degree of the administration to look for information on Donald Trump and his associates, his campaign team and his transition team. This is really, really serious stuff.”
Michael Doran, former NSC senior director, told TheDCNF Monday that “somebody blew a hole in the wall between national security secrets and partisan politics.” This “was a stream of information that was supposed to be hermetically sealed from politics and the Obama administration found a way to blow a hole in that wall,” he said.
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Doran charged that potential serious crimes were undertaken because “this is a leaking of signal intelligence.”
“That’s a felony,” he told TheDCNF. “And you can get 10 years for that. It is a tremendous abuse of the system. We’re not supposed to be monitoring American citizens. Bigger than the crime, is the breach of public trust.”
Waurishuk said he was most dismayed that “this is now using national intelligence assets and capabilities to spy on the elected, yet-to-be-seated president.”
“We’re looking at a potential constitutional crisis from the standpoint that we used an extremely strong capability that’s supposed to be used to safeguard and protect the country,” he said. “And we used it for political purposes by a sitting president. That takes on a new precedent.”
: Comment: LOL....
: ===============================
: Since news broke Monday that the Obama Administration's
: National Security Adviser, Susan Rice, directed the
: "unmasking" of NSA intercepts of Trump
: associates, CNN has raced to shoot down the blockbuster
: report.
: CNN Tonight's Don Lemon went so far as to announce he would
: ignore the news at all costs.
: While interviewing a Democratic congressman, CNN's Chris Cuomo
: claimed it was "demonstrably untrue" Rice sought
: surveillance of the Trump team, even as that's exactly what
: yesterday's reports prove.
: Over the last 24 hours, the network has also repeatedly called
: on its chief national security correspondent, Jim Sciutto,
: to dismiss the reports as a non-story; Sciutto has even
: excused Rice claiming ignorance of the unmasking scandal
: two weeks ago, arguing Rice "wasn't aware" what
: unmasking Rep. Devin Nunes (D-Calif.) was referring to.
: And on Tuesday's "New Day," anchor Alisyn Camerota
: openly pleaded with Sen. John McCain to write-off the news
: as unimportant.
: Last night, Lemon began "CNN Tonight" with an
: announcement that the Rice report a "fake scandal
: ginned up by right-wing media and Trump" that he would
: not be baited into justifying with coverage.
: "On this program tonight, we will not insult your
: intelligence by pretending," it's legitimate, he said.
: "Nor will we aid and abet the people trying to
: misinform you, the American people, by creating a
: diversion. Not going to do it."
: Sciutto also claimed the story was "ginned up" to
: distract from Trump tweeting that the Trump Tower was
: "wiretapped," when it was in fact communications
: were picked up through ordinary NSA surveillance.
: "Again, to note by senior intelligence officials who work
: for both Democrats and Republicans, this appears to be a
: story, largely ginned up, partly as a distraction from this
: larger investigation," Sciutto told Anderson Cooper,
: explaining that "someone close to Ambassador
: Rice" told him this type of unmasking is "not
: unusual."
: In another appearance, Sciutto even attempted to excuse Rice
: from claiming to have no knowledge of the unmasking she's
: been caught orchestrating.
: "From her perspective she didn’t know what specific
: unmasking Devin Nunes and others are talking about, in part
: because that is something she asks — or asked during the
: regular course of her work as national security
: adviser," he said. "I do know from speaking to
: people yesterday close to her that she doesn’t know
: specifically what Devin Nunes and others are accusing her
: of when it comes to unmasking because that was something
: sets in the regular course of her job."
: And in yet another appearance, Sciutto also setup something of
: a strawman, arguing that the unmasking story is not
: important because "unmasking is not leaking."
: During an interview with Sen. John McCain, CNN's Camerota
: plainly tried nudging the Arizona senator into dismissing
: the Rice bombshell: CAMEROTA: “Okay, senator, I want to
: move on to other news of the day and that is, as you know,
: the Trump White House has talked about what they see or
: they say they see as a controversy of the former national
: security adviser Susan Rice unmasking a name, someone on
: team Trump, that was somehow caught up in some incidental
: collection of surveillance. They say that this is a
: controversy, it shows that she has done something wildly
: out of the bounds of normalcy. Is this business as usual
: for a national security adviser to ask for a name to be
: revealed, an American name, if she wants to know more or is
: this some sort of a controversy?”
: McCAIN: “I think the circumstances indicate that there’s a
: possibility that that request could have been politically
: motivated. But we need to get to the bottom of it. As I’ve
: said, and I’ll probably say many more times because I’m
: kind of boring, this is a centipede. A shoe will drop every
: few days, the latest the meeting in Seychelles. This is a
: requirement, in my view, why we need a select committee in
: order to get through all this because there’s lots more
: shoes that will drop. I can’t make a judgment on what I
: just heard. She did have the authority to do it. What was
: the motivation for doing it, I think is the question.”
: CAMEROTA: “What we’ve heard from the reporting, is that if she
: saw a masked name that said American number one had these
: conversations with Russians at the same time that President
: Obama had imposed sanctions, wouldn’t that arouse some
: curiosity on her part?”
: McCAIN: “All I can say, Alisyn, is that I don’t know enough to
: reach a conclusion except to say this is another aspect of
: this multi-dimensional scandal."
:
: https://news.grabien.com/story-cnn-goes-rampage-against-susan-rice-bombshell-instructs-view
