By Karen DeYoung, Karoun Demirjian
April 5, 2017
Former Obama national security
adviser Susan E. Rice said Tuesday that she “absolutely” never sought to
uncover “for political purposes” the names of Trump campaign or transition
officials concealed in intelligence intercepts, and she called suggestions that
she leaked those identities “completely false.”
“I leaked nothing, to nobody, and
never have and never would,” Rice said in response to the latest charges and
countercharges flowing from politically charged investigations into Russian
interference in the presidential election.
Since they were first reported
over the weekend, the Rice reports have quickly overtaken the steady drumbeat
of revelations about connections to Moscow that have dogged President Trump for
months. On Tuesday, the subject dominated cable news and flooded Twitter.
“RICE ORDERED SPY DOCS ON TRUMP?”
the president retweeted,
with a link to the Daily Caller and a Drudge Report headlined “Boiled Rice.”
A number of Republican lawmakers
said that Rice should be called to testify before congressional inquiries into
what U.S. intelligence has said were Russian efforts not only to roil the
presidential race, but also to tip the scales in Trump’s favor.
“If the reports are right, then
she will be of interest to us,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), chairman of
the Senate Intelligence Committee, which, along with its House counterpart and
the FBI, is investigating the matter.
“When it comes to Susan E. Rice,
you need to verify, not trust,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said in an
interview with Fox News. “I think every American should know whether or not the
national security adviser to President Obama was involved in unmasking Trump
transition figures for political purposes.”
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) called
Rice the “Typhoid Mary of the Obama administration.”
Beyond Trump’s tweets, however,
the White House was uncharacteristically restrained on the subject, as its
media and Capitol Hill allies expressed outrage on its behalf. “It’s not for me
to decide who should testify or how they should do it,” press secretary Sean
Spicer said.
Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the
ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called the attention
focused on Rice a diversionary tactic. He has also called on the Intelligence
Committee’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R), a Trump transition official and
fellow Californian, to recuse himself from the investigation. The White House,
Schiff said, has a “strong desire . . . that we lose our focus, that we not
pursue the investigation of Russia, particularly as it might impact the Trump
campaign.”
At the same time, Schiff told
CNN, Rice has long been a target of what he called the “Breitbart crowd . . .
the hard right” since the September 2012 attacks on a U.S. diplomatic facility
in Benghazi, Libya. Four U.S. officials were killed in an extremist attack that
Rice initially described as an anti-American protest that evolved into
violence.
White House chief strategist
Stephen K. Bannon is the former chairman of Breitbart News, which he has
described as “the platform for the alt-right,” an antiglobalist movement that
seeks a whites-only state.
Asked Tuesday whether she was
willing to testify, Rice told MSNBC, “Let’s see what comes.” Investigations on
“Russian involvement in our electoral process are very important, they’re very
serious, and every American ought to have an interest in those investigations
going wherever the evidence indicates they should,” she said.
“I have an interest as an
American citizen, as a former official,” Rice said. “I would want to be helpful
in that process if I could.”
The focus on Rice comes as
lawmakers are trying to iron out why Nunes went to the White House two weeks
ago to view documents that he later said suggested that the names of Trump
transition team members had been improperly “unmasked.” Top officials can ask
intelligence agencies to reveal the names to them for national security or
other reasons.
The term refers to revealing a
name that has been blacked out in an intelligence surveillance report. The law
does not permit surveillance of U.S. people without a warrant; if one shows up
in authorized surveillance of a foreign person, it is “masked.”
News media reports on contacts
between Russia and Trump associates, including in The Washington Post, have
included names said to have appeared in intelligence reports — either persons
named in conversations between foreigners, or conversations directly between
foreigners and U.S. persons.
Most prominent among them is
former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, whose December phone
conversations with Russia’s ambassador in Washington included references to
U.S. sanctions imposed under President Barack Obama. After a Post report
on the conversations, Trump ousted Flynn for mischaracterizing them to Vice
President Pence.
Trump later charged that he,
himself, had been surveilled under orders from Obama, who allegedly was seeking
to undermine him. The administration has said repeatedly that attention should
be focused on who unmasked and leaked, rather than on the information revealed.
After Nunes’s statement about the
unmasking, The Post reported last week that at least three White House
officials were involved in handling the files shown to him. On Monday, a report
by Bloomberg View suggested that those officials began examining the files
after discovering that Rice, while working as Obama’s national security
adviser, had requested the names be unmasked.
The Daily Caller followed with a report,
sourced to former U.S. attorney Joe DiGenova and “other official sources,” that
said that Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of
phone calls involving Trump and his aides.
The White House immediately drew
attention to a PBS interview in which Rice, on the same day as Nunes’s
statement about the documents, said, “I know nothing about this.”
Speaking Tuesday to MSNBC, Rice
said that she, like other top officials in all administrations, sometimes asked
for names of U.S. persons that had been blacked out in intelligence reports —
“on every topic under the sun when it seemed relevant” — when necessary to
“protect the American people and do our jobs.”
“Let me give you an example —
completely made up,” she said. “Let’s say there was a conversation between two
foreigners about a conversation they were having about an American who was
proposing to sell to them high-tech bomb-making equipment.
“Now, if that came to me as the
national security adviser, it would matter enormously — is that some kook
sitting in his living room communicating via the Internet to sell something he
doesn’t have, or is this a serious person or company or entity with the ability
to provide this technology perhaps to an adversary? That would be an example of
how it is necessary knowing who that person was to assess that information.”
“I can’t say that the pace of
unmasking requests” rose during the Trump transition, Rice said. But, she said,
“the pace of intelligence reports on Russian interference efforts increased”
beginning in late summer. Intelligence officials went back to rescrub the
reports after Obama requested a compilation of them, which was delivered in
January, she said.
“There was no spreadsheet,
nothing of the sort,” Rice said.
“The allegation is that somehow
Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes,”
she said. “Absolutely false.”
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