IWB
FNC’s Housley: Sources Say Those Who ‘Unmasked’ Trump, Associates ‘Very High Up’
What we’ve learned is this — from multiple sources is that it’s all about intelligence-gathering methods. The fact is, a lot of these men and women in the intelligence communities did not want to speak about what’s going on because they were concerned about those methods being known. But now they figure they might as well at least clarify things since Nunes has been leaked to by someone they don’t know or at least they tell me they don’t know. We know that there was this — there was surveillance of Trump and people close to Donald Trump including some supporters for up to a year before inauguration. That information was disseminated we’re told through NSA channels. It’s unprecedented the way this was done. The mention of U.S. citizens is supposed to be masked. That means basically taken out of the report.
Trump praises Fox News report on ‘unmasking and the crooked scheme against us’
“Such amazing reporting on unmasking and the crooked scheme against us by @foxandfriends,” the president said early Monday morning.
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“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 U.S. election,” a congressional source close to the investigation told Fox News.
Top Obama Adviser Sought Names of Trump Associates in Intel
White House lawyers last month discovered that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The pattern of Rice’s requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on “unmasking” the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like “U.S. Person One.”
“The National Security Agency’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”
Frank Church
The question that now needs to be answered about Rice’s requests is whether she unmasked the Trump advisers out of legitimate national security concerns or for political reasons.
Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. attorney, believes it is the latter.
“This is now at a point where Ms. Rice and three other people are going to need lawyers. This is going to make the General Flynn look like a picnic. These folks are in very, very serious trouble,” diGenova said during an interview with WMAL radio station.
The retired prosecutor claimed to have information about Rice’s involvement and that of three other Obama White House officials.
“What was done by the Obama White House…was to use the American intercept capability of [National Security Agency] and the CIA for political purposes, not the determine intelligence,” he said.
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This is the kind of person that has access to information about Americans caught up in “incidental surveillance.” We now know what she did with that access.
And lest we forget…
h/t Daniel Higdon