Former national security adviser Susan Rice. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice reportedly tried to learn the identities of officials on President Donald Trump's transition team whose conversations with foreign officials were incidentally collected during routine intelligence-gathering operations.

The intelligence reports obtained by Rice, who served under President Barack Obama from 2013 to 2017, "were summaries of monitored conversations — primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials," Bloomberg's Eli Lake reported on Monday.

National-security experts say Rice's reported requests to identify who was speaking with the foreign officials before Trump was inaugurated were neither unusual nor against the law — especially if, as Lake reported, the foreign officials being monitored were discussing "valuable political information" that required the identity of the people they were speaking to, or about, to be uncovered.

"The identities of US persons may be released under two circumstances: 1) the identity is needed to make sense of the intercept; 2) if a crime is involved in the conversation," said Robert Deitz, a former senior counselor to the CIA director and former general counsel at the National Security Agency.

"Any senior official who receives the underlying intelligence may request these identities," Deitz said, noting that while "the bar for obtaining the identity is not particularly high, it must come from a senior official, and the reason cannot simply be raw curiosity."

Documents showing that Rice made those requests were uncovered by the National Security Council's senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, according to Lake's reporting. Cohen-Watnick was involved in providing documents related to the incidental surveillance of members of Trump's transition team to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes about two weeks ago, though it is unclear if they are the same documents mentioned in Lake's reporting.

Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Nunes, a California Republican, told reporters last month that he briefed Trump on the documents because he was concerned about the potential "unmasking" of US persons caught up in routine surveillance, though he said he had no evidence that such unmasking had been unwarranted or illegal.

A source of concern to some, however, has been why some of Trump's associates who had been caught up in the surveillance and later unmasked, such as former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, had their names leaked to the press. Lake, for instance, has argued that the "selective leaking of monitored communications of US persons is a police-state tactic."

But former NSA Director Michael Hayden, who also served as the principal deputy director of national intelligence and the director of the CIA, cautioned against "automatically assuming that the US person was party to the conversation" that may have prompted an unmasking.

"My life experience suggests that the overwhelming proportion of these cases of incidental collection is not information to or from an American, but information about an American," Hayden said. "In this case, it is very likely in most instances two foreigners talking about the Trump transition."

Lake's article follows a Fox News report citing "a source" who said the official who sought to identify the people who were speaking with monitored foreign agents was "very well known, very high up, very senior in the intelligence world."

Trump on Monday praised Fox's "amazing reporting on unmasking and the crooked scheme against us," which he said showed that "there was electronic surveillance" of his inner circle during the transition.

'A carefully documented process'

As Nunes has told reporters and as Lake has reported, there is no evidence that Trump and his team were directly surveilled.

The move by Rice, if she had probable cause, could likely be viewed as routine and expected of high-level intelligence officials, said Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the CIA and former executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for intelligence.

President Donald Trump. Thomson Reuters

"There is an unavoidable tension between, on one hand, restricting information to protect the privacy of US persons and, on the other hand, sharing enough information with the consumers of intelligence so that the intelligence report in question is comprehensible and useful," Pillar said in an email. "And if the report is not that, why bother collecting and disseminating the information in the first place?

"The producer of the report, usually the NSA, tends to err on the side of restricting the information, while a senior consumer's natural tendency is to want more information."

Steve Slick, a former CIA operations officer and NSC official who now heads the Intelligence Studies Project at the University of Texas at Austin, agreed that the consumer of the report would often require more information to understand the significance of the intelligence.

"By definition, any report that the NSA elects to disseminate is relevant to a foreign or national-security issue," Slick said. But it is "often not possible for a consumer or reader to fully understand the significance of a report without knowing precisely which US person may have been communicating with the foreign official," he added.

"The national security adviser, or a member of his/her staff, or perhaps a morning intelligence briefer, would convey that request to the originating agency with an explanation of who wishes to know the identity and why," Slick said. "In my experience, legitimate requests are promptly granted, and less defensible requests (or requesters) are challenged."

Hayden largely echoed that assessment.

"The NSA is notoriously conservative in revealing US identities in its reporting," Hayden said. "Obviously, a request from the national security adviser to unmask an identity would be given great weight. That said, it is not automatic and goes through a carefully documented process at the NSA before an identity is unmasked."

Obama talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and Rice, second from left, in November 2015. REUTERS/Cem Oksuz/Pool

An 'effort to divert attention' from the Trump-Russia probe

Pillar, who is now a nonresident senior fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security Studies, said Rice may have even been motivated to request identities in order to constrain her own communications.

"If Ms. Rice was communicating with members of Trump's team regarding transition matters and she learns from intelligence that some such members also are communicating with the Russians, she would want to know exactly who is doing that so she can be extra careful in her own talks, lest something she says gets relayed to Moscow," Pillar said.

At least one member of Trump's transition team had his conversations picked up incidentally during routine surveillance of Russia's ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, last year: Flynn, the former national security adviser. He was forced to resign in February after reports surfaced that said he spoke with Kislyak about US sanctions on Russia despite telling Vice President Mike Pence that he hadn't.

Michael Flynn, the first national security adviser to Trump. Flynn resigned in February. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

The FBI has been examining whether Trump associates colluded with Russian officials to undermine Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election. The probe into Trump's ties to Russia is part of the bureau's broader investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election, FBI Director James Comey said during a House Intelligence Committee hearing last month.

"This whole story strikes me as just more of the effort to divert attention from the issue of the relations that Trump and his associates have had with Russia, and as part of the diversion to try to suggest impropriety of some sort on the part of the Obama administration," Pillar said. "In other words, it's a continuation of an effort to salvage something from Trump's baseless charges about Obama wiretapping him."

The White House has tried repeatedly, with varying degrees of evidence, to validate Trump's explosive claim made last month that Obama wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower during the election.

A former Obama administration official responsible for the Defense Department's Russia policy, for instance, came into the White House's crosshairs last week for what it has characterized as her admission that Obama-era officials were collecting intelligence on Trump and his transition team.

Pillar said that "an important thing to remember is that we are dealing with foreign intelligence — intelligence on Russian activities — and indeed, Russian activities that strike close to the heart of our democratic processes.

"We should be disturbed if whoever was in office was not keeping close tabs on that sort of thing," he said.</s>Jim Schiutto of CNN obtained a statement Monday from former national security security adviser Susan Rice about the allegation that she improperly requested the "unmasking" of Donald Trump officials that were incidentally surveilled by U.S. intelligence agencies.

"Well, just a short time ago," Schiutto reported, "I spoke with someone close to Ambassador Rice, and this is the first comment from someone close to Rice today on these allegations. I'll read it in quotes."

The idea that Ambassador Rice improperly sought the identities of Americans is false. There is nothing unusual about making these requests when serving as a senior national security official, whether Democrat or Republican.

"That coming from someone who works for Ambassador Rice," he continued, "but, let's go beyond that, because I spoke today with senior former senior U.S. intelligence officials, the senior-most, who served both Republican and Democratic administrations and this is what they've told me about this story."

"They said, one, this is not unusual," Schiutto added. "This happens, when you are briefed on intelligence, communications like this, sometimes senior national security officials can ask the intelligence community to identify the Americans either mentioned in those conversations or on the other side of those phone calls."

"It's not up to that senior U.S. national security official to make that decision," he explained. "It's then up the intelligence agencies, the NSA, they decide what's appropriate to unmask for that senior official. It is legal. There are protocols that have been put in place since 9/11 to allow this to happen. And I'm told, it's very meticulously logged, someone said to me, described, it's like, it's like Catholic baptismal records, it's so well logged. You can't do this in secret. And you have to do it with the approval of the intelligence community."

"And finally, Anderson, I would just say," Schiutto concluded, "why would someone do this? Every day they're getting briefings on intelligence. Their briefer chooses what they're briefed on, including Ambassador Rice. In those briefings, and officials such as Rice might say, 'to further understand it, I'd like to know who those names are,' and that's why they would make that request. Which then, as I said, has to be approved by the intelligence community."

The short statement from Rice's associate denied that the unmasking was "improper," but appeared to confirm that it indeed happened. Many have taken the report as further evidence to prove Trump's accusation of wiretapping, or surveillance more broadly, against former President Barack Obama.</s>Journalist and author Mike Cernovich has just dropped an exclusive bombshell – naming Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice as the official responsible for the ‘unmasking’ of the incoming Trump team during ‘incidental’ surveillance. This was apparently discovered after the White House Counsel’s office reviewed Rice’s document log requests:

The reports Rice requested to see are kept under tightly-controlled conditions. Each person must log her name before being granted access to them. Upon learning of Rice’s actions, [National Security Advisor] H. R. McMaster dispatched his close aide Derek Harvey to Capitol Hill to brief Chairman Nunes.

Cernovich points out, as revealed in an article by Circa, that President Obama began loosening the rules regarding “incidental intercepts” starting in 2011 – making it easier for the US Government to spy on individuals who are not the primary target(s) of a surveillance operation.

As his presidency drew to a close, Barack Obama’s top aides routinely reviewed intelligence reports gleaned from the National Security Agency’s incidental intercepts of Americans abroad, taking advantage of rules their boss relaxed starting in 2011 to help the government better fight terrorism, espionage by foreign enemies and hacking threats

And guess who had authorization to unmask individuals who were ‘incidentally’ surveilled? Former CIA Director John Brennan, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Obama’s National Security advisor Susan Rice.

Also of note is the claim that New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman has been sitting on the Susan Rice story for at least two days:

This reporter has been informed that Maggie Haberman has had this story about Susan Rice for at least 48 hours, and has chosen to sit on it in an effort to protect the reputation of former President Barack Obama.

Fox News anchor Adam Housley tweeted on Friday that the surveillance that led to the unmasking began before Trump was the GOP nominee:</s>If Susan Rice is behind the unmasking then it most certainly means that Barack Obama was aware of what was going on and could have very well been behind the entire spying, surveillance and wiretapping of candidate Donald Trump.

Once again it appears that Trump was right: the conspiracy theory that a close Obama associate worked to “unmask” the Trump team, resulting in the ongoing media spectacle over “collusion” between Trump and the Kremlin, has been confirmed, first by Mike Cernovich, and now by Bloomberg itself. As noted last night, Journalist and author Mike Cernovich dropped an exclusive bombshell – naming Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice as the official responsible for the ‘unmasking’ of the incoming Trump team during ‘incidental’ surveillance. This was apparently discovered after the White House Counsel’s office reviewed Rice’s document log requests: The reports Rice requested to see are kept under tightly-controlled conditions. Each person must log her name before being granted access to them. Upon learning of Rice’s actions, [National Security Advisor] H. R. McMaster dispatched his close aide Derek Harvey to Capitol Hill to brief Chairman Nunes. Cernovich pointed out, as revealed in an article by Circa, that President Obama began loosening the rules regarding “incidental intercepts” starting in 2011 – making it easier for the US Government to spy on individuals who are not the primary target(s) of a surveillance operation. As his presidency drew to a close, Barack Obama’s top aides routinely reviewed intelligence reports gleaned from the National Security Agency’s incidental intercepts of Americans abroad, taking advantage of rules their boss relaxed starting in 2011 to help the government better fight terrorism, espionage by foreign enemies and hacking threats. And guess who had authorization to unmask individuals who were ‘incidentally’ surveilled? Former CIA Director John Brennan, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Obama’s National Security advisor Susan Rice. Also of note is the claim that New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman has been sitting on the Susan Rice story for at least two days: This reporter has been informed that Maggie Haberman has had this story about Susan Rice for at least 48 hours, and has chosen to sit on it in an effort to protect the reputation of former President Barack Obama. Fox News anchor Adam Housley tweeted on Friday that the surveillance that led to the unmasking began before Trump was the GOP nominee, and that the person who did the unmasking is a “very senior” and “very well known” person in the surveillance community – and not someone in the FBI. As ZeroPointNow noted, “this of course begs the question of whether or not President Obama would have ordered Rice to perform the unmasking.”

White House lawyers last month learned 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 Council’s senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, was conducting the review, according to two U.S. officials who spoke with Bloomberg View on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. In February Cohen-Watnick discovered Rice’s multiple requests to unmask U.S. persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities. He brought this to the attention of the White House General Counsel’s office, who reviewed more of Rice’s requests and instructed him to end his own research into the unmasking policy. The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations — primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration. Rice did not respond to an email seeking comment on Monday morning. Her role in requesting the identities of Trump transition officials adds an important element to the dueling investigations surrounding the Trump White House since the president’s inauguration. Both the House and Senate intelligence committees are probing any ties between Trump associates and a Russian influence operation against Hillary Clinton during the election. The chairman of the House intelligence committee, Representative Devin Nunes, is also investigating how the Obama White House kept tabs on the Trump transition after the election through unmasking the names of Trump associates incidentally collected in government eavesdropping of foreign officials. Rice herself has not spoken directly on the issue of unmasking. Last month when she was asked on the “PBS NewsHour” about reports that Trump transition officials, including Trump himself, were swept up in incidental intelligence collection, Rice said: “I know nothing about this,” adding, “I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that account today.” Rice’s requests to unmask the names of Trump transition officials do not vindicate Trump’s own tweets from March 4 in which he accused Obama of illegally tapping Trump Tower. There remains no evidence to support that claim. But Rice’s multiple requests to learn the identities of Trump officials discussed in intelligence reports during the transition period does highlight a longstanding concern for civil liberties advocates about U.S. surveillance programs. The standard for senior officials to learn the names of U.S. persons incidentally collected is that it must have some foreign intelligence value, a standard that can apply to almost anything. This suggests Rice’s unmasking requests were likely within the law. The news about Rice also sheds light on the strange behavior of Nunes in the last two weeks. It emerged last week that he traveled to the White House last month, the night before he made an explosive allegation about Trump transition officials caught up in incidental surveillance. At the time he said he needed to go to the White House because the reports were only on a database for the executive branch. It now appears that he needed to view computer systems within the National Security Council that would include the logs of Rice’s requests to unmask U.S. persons.</s>President Obama’s former White House National Security Adviser Susan Rice is battling claims that she mishandled classified information when she requested the identities of people connected to President Trump’s transition team in raw intelligence reports. Rice told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, “I leaked nothing to nobody.”</s>Start the countdown to Susan Rice blaming this on a video:

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 all those at the National Security Council, some at the Defense Department, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-CIA Director John Brennan – essentially, the officials at the top, including former Rice deputy Ben Rhodes. The names 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.

On CNN, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon, citing the cable net’s national security reporter, dismissed the whole thing as ridiculous:

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo told viewers on Tuesday that the controversy surrounding former National Security Adviser Susan Rice is “another fake scandal being peddled by right-wing media.” Cuomo offered the remarks about Rice’s reported request to know the identities of Trump transition team members mentioned in intelligence briefings during CNN’s “New Day.” Rice has been accused of unmasking the Trump transition members. “So President Trump wants you to believe that he is the victim of a ‘crooked scheme,” Cuomo began. “Those are his words. And here are our words: there is no evidence of any wrongdoing.

 […]

 Cuomo’s commentary echoes that of CNN host Don Lemon and network national security correspondent Jim Sciutto from Monday night. Lemon told his audience that his show “will not insult your intelligence” by focusing too much on the story.

The CNN reporter Cuomo and Lemon cited has an impeccable source close to the Obama administration: Himself:

“The idea that Ambassador Rice improperly sought the identities of Americans is false. There is nothing unusual about making these requests when serving as a senior national security official, whether Democrat or Republican,” said Sciutto, a former member of the Obama State Department until 2013.

The denial came from… somebody:

Also, his best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who’s going with the girl who said Rice didn’t do anything wrong.

And if you need more convincing, Marie Harf vouched for Rice. I’m sold!

If you’re keeping score at home, this all started out with Democrats and mainstream media (pardon the redundancy) mocking Trump for claiming members of his transition team were “wiretapped” during Obama’s last months in office, and it’s now at the “any surveillance that happened was totally legal” stage:

On ABC’s Good Morning America, White House correspondent Cecilia Vega didn’t even pretend to report the new development objectively. After anchor Amy Robach noted the uproar among conservatives to the report, Vega agreed, noting some were calling it “the smoking gun.” But Vega quickly shot down this argument, saying “It is not that.” Definitely so. In fact, some of president’s conservatives allies are applauding this, they are calling this the smoking gun, that proves his wiretapping claims. It is not that Amy. A former aide close to Rice doesn’t deny that she did, in fact, seek out these names but they say she did nothing illegal or nothing out of the purview of her job. Her former job as national security advisor, Amy. Just like ABC, NBC also relied on an unnamed source to defend Rice. White House correspondent Kristen Welker’s report on Today downplayed the news, passively connecting Rice to the report, and arguing it was “common practice” for security officials to do what she did. Separately, Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice is in the spotlight this morning amid reports she requested the identities of U.S. citizens in intelligence reports. That wound up connecting to some of Donald Trump’s transition and campaign officials. Trump administration says Rice crossed the line by doing it. Now Rice hasn’t commented publicly, but former Obama officials are pushing back and argue it is common practice to seek identities in the course of trying to understand intelligence reports.</s>Former national security advisor Susan Rice asked dozens of times for the names of Donald Trump associates to be 'unmasked' in foreign surveillance reports.

Rice is the Obama administration official whose name became a punchline after her repeated false claims that the 2012 Benghazi terror attacks were caused by a crude Internet video.

From her position as chief of the National Security Council, according to a Bloomberg columnist, Rice asked government agencies to identify names that had been withheld from raw intelligence reports linked with Trump campaign and transition figures.

The first drip of information hinting at Rice's involvement came Friday when Fox News reported that the names of several Trumpworld figures were exposed by someone 'very well known, very high up, very senior in the intelligence world.'

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said last week that the Trump administration had uncovered unspecified material 'in the normal course of business,' which was then shared with the House Intelligence Committee's Republican chairman Devin Nunes.

Bloomberg reports that the National Security Council was conducting a review of U.S. policy on how people's identities can be unmasked after their communications are captured incidentally in the course of conducting foreign surveillance.

The names of U.S. citizens who aren't the targets of court-approved snooping are typically replaced with designations such as 'U.S. Person One' or 'U.S. Person Two' before reports can be circulated to the broad variety of American intelligence agencies.

Ezra Cohen-Watnick, one of the Trump administration intelligence officials who showed Nunes the mysterious materials last week, was conducting the 'unmasking' review.

He brought his concerns about Rice's behavior to the White House counsel's office in February – before President Trump began tweeting claims on March 4 that the Obama administration 'wiretapped' him at his private New York city office.

Rice had access to intelligence reports that also contained 'valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration,' according to Bloomberg.

It's not known whether the president was told, before his now famous tweet storm, what the White House counsel's office had learned.

But Trump told Financial Times on Saturday that his tweets are 'turning out to be true.'

Rice insisted last month that she was in the dark about any efforts to identify Trump-linked private individuals in intelligence reports, after Nunes publicly referred to 'unmasking.'

'I know nothing about this,' she told PBS. 'I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that account today.'

There is not necessarily anything illegal or unusual about a national security adviser seeking to unmask names in raw reports, in order to fully understand the meaning of incepted conversations.

But in this case those identities – including the name of then-National Security Advisor Mike Flynn – were subsequently leaked and made public.

'The real story turns out to be SURVEILLANCE and LEAKING! Find the leakers,' Trump tweeted on Sunday.

He continued to cite the Fox News Channel on Monday, writing on Twitter that the network reported 'from multiple sources: "There was electronic surveillance of Trump, and people close to Trump. This is unprecedented".'</s>On Tuesday afternoon, President Barack Obama’s former National Security Advisor Susan Rice appeared on MSNBC with host Andrea Mitchell to answer questions about allegations that had emerged earlier in the week to suggest that she requested the “unmasking” of the names of Donald Trump’s campaign and transition teams in intelligence reports, which allegedly had nothing to do with national security, and that she had compiled spreadsheet of those names.

Here are the highlights of Mitchell’s interview with Rice, which took up the first quarter-hour of Mitchell’s show.
• Rice admitted asking for the names of U.S. citizens in intelligence reports to be “unmasked.” Rice said: “There were occasions when I would receive a report in which a U.S. person was referred to. Name not provided, just U.S. person. And sometimes in that context, in order to understand the importance of the report, and assess its significance, it was necessary to find out, or request, the information as to who that U.S. official was.” Rice argued it was necessary for her and other officials to request that information, on occasion, to “do our jobs” to protect national security.
• Rice admitted asking specifically for the names of members of Donald Trump’s transition team. She argued that she had not done so for political purposes, however. Mitchell asked: “Did you seek the names of people involved in — to unmask the names of people involved in the Trump transition, the people surrounding the president-elect in order to spy on them and expose them?” Rice answered: “Absolutely not for any political purposes to spy, expose, anything.”
• Rice denied leaking the name of former General Michael Flynn. “I leaked nothing to nobody, and never have, and never would.” She added that to discuss particular targets would be to reveal classified information. She later walked back her denial. Mitchell: “The allegation is that you were leaking the fact that he spoke to the [Russian] ambassador and perhaps to others.” Rice: “I can’t get into any specific reports … what I can say is there is an established process.”
• Rice denied reports that she prepared a “spreadsheet” of Trump transition staff under surveillance. Mitchell asked specifically about the Daily Caller story Tuesday: “They allege there was a spreadsheet you put out of all of these names and circulated it.” Rice: “Absolutely false. No spreadsheet, no nothing of the sort.” She said that unmasked names “was not then typically broadly disseminated throughout the national security community or the government.”
• Rice said that even if she did request the names of citizens to be unmasked, that did not mean she leaked them. “The notion … that by asking for the identity of an American person, that is the same as leaking it, is completely false.”
• Rice admitted that the pace of intelligence reports accelerated throughout the election. She said she could not say whether the pace of her “unmasking” requests accelerated, but she said there was increasing concern, as well as increasing information, relating to the possibility of Russian interference in the election, particularly after August 2016.
• Rice implied that President Obama himself ordered the compilation of intelligence reports on Trump officials. “…the president requested the compliation of the intelligence, which was ultimately provided in January [2017].”
• Rice said that she was unaware, even while working with Flynn during the transition, that he was working for the Turkish government. Mitchell asked: “When did you learn that?” Rice answered: “In the press, as everybody else did.” Mitchell, incredulously: “You didn’t know that, when you were National Security Advisor?” Rice: “I did not.”
• Rice reiterated that President Obama never tapped Trump’s phone. “Absolutely false … there was no such collection [or] surveillance on Trump Tower or Trump individuals … directed by the White House or targeted at Trump individuals.” She did not deny that there might have been some surveillance by other agencies, however. She said it was impossible for the White House to order such surveillance, but that the Department of Justice could have done so.
• Rice seemed aggrieved by Trump’s claims. “It wasn’t typical of the way presidents treat their predecessors.”
• Rice would not say whether she would be willing to testify on Capitol Hill before Congress. “Let’s see what comes. I’m not going to sit here and prejudge,” she said. But she insisted that the investigations into Russian interference in the presidential election were of interest to every American citizen, and should be followed wherever the evidence leads.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.</s>Washington (CNN) Since her time as a national security adviser and former UN ambassador during the Obama administration, Susan Rice had largely been out of the limelight until she was recently thrust into the snowballing White House surveillance controversy.

Rice reportedly attempted on numerous occasions to uncover the identities of President Donald Trump's associates caught on tape incidentally during intelligence surveillance. The report quickly re-opened an unsubstantiated debate on whether the Obama administration previously ordered wiretaps on Trump's phones.

Rice defended her actions Tuesday, telling MSNBC that her requests were "absolutely not for any political purposes, to spy, or anything."

"There were occasions when I would receive a report in which a US person was referred to -- name not provided, just a US person -- and sometimes in that context, in order to understand the importance of the report, and assess its significance, it was necessary to find out, or request the information as to who the US official was," Rice said.

"The notion that some people are trying to suggest, is that by asking for the identity of a person is leaking it, is unequivocally false," Rice added. "There is no connection between unmasking and leaking."

It's not the first time Rice has found herself at the center of a political controversy. A steadfast fixture through both of Obama's presidential terms, she served as the US ambassador to the United Nations and later national security adviser from 2013 to 2017.

In the days following the September 11, 2012, attacks on the Benghazi consulate that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, Rice became the Obama administration's point person on the matter. In multiple TV appearances soon after that attack, Rice cited an anti-Islam video that fueled a "spontaneous" mob as the reason for the deaths.

Months after the attack, Rice's comments in the wake of the attack were used as grist by Senate Republicans who said they could not support her as Clinton's successor. Obama eventually appointed Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts to the role.

Following her appointment as national security adviser, Rice created some waves in a 2014 interview where she appeared to offer pity for accused Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl, who had just been released to the US.

Bergdahl was accused of deserting his unit in 2009. After nearly five years in Taliban captivity, the US exchanged five Taliban prisoners for his release.

"I realize there has been lots of discussion and controversy around this," Rice said. "But what I was referring to was the fact that this was a young man who volunteered to serve his country in uniform at a time of war. That, in and of itself, is a very honorable thing."

As details of Bergdahl's disappearance became public following his release, the Obama administration came under increasing fire for its decision to trade the Taliban prisoners. Rice's comments attracted criticism from members of the military and Republicans who viewed Bergdahl as a deserter and objected to the trade.

While serving under President Bill Clinton, Albright recommended that he tap Rice for a high-level State Department post on African affairs in the late 1990s.

Albright had previously served with Rice's mother, Lois Rice, on a school board in Washington and watched Rice grow up with her own daughters.

Her father, Emmett Rice, died in 2011. He was a professor of economics at Cornell University, was a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and flew with the Tuskegee Airmen in World War II.

Rice, who was valedictorian of her class and a star point guard on the basketball team at the National Cathedral School, exhibited "superior leadership skills" and "left behind a remarkable legacy," wrote former teacher John Wood who noted Rice's accomplishments in a Washington Post letter to the editor.

She earned Phi Beta Kappa honors at Stanford University, where she earned her bachelors degree in history and won a Rhodes Scholarship to study international relations at Oxford University in 1986.

After graduation from Oxford, Rice headed to McKinsey & Company in Toronto, where she worked as an international management consultant. In 1992, she married Ian Cameron, a producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, whom she had met at Stanford.

In 1993, Rice returned to Washington to take a position with the National Security Council as director of international organizations and peacekeeping.

She was promoted in 1995 to become special assistant to Clinton and senior director of African affairs at the White House National Security Council.

In 2008, she was national security and foreign relations adviser for Obama's first presidential campaign.

In nominating her to the ambassador's post, Obama called Rice "a close and trusted adviser" and said she "shares my belief that the UN is an indispensable -- and imperfect -- forum."

At the same time, she has drawn some attention for the way she operates. Insiders say Rice is ambitious and aggressive.

"I think that everyone has complicated feelings about her," Lynch said.

He characterized her as "very personable, likeable, charming, smart, funny, down to earth" but also someone with sharp elbows.</s>The diplomat who is in line to be America's next NATO ambassador said Monday that former National Security Advisor Susan Rice has been suspected 'for weeks' of involvement in an effort to publicly unmask Donald Trump associates whose names appeared in foreign intelligence reports.

And he claimed ten days ago that if Rice and her deputy Ben Rhodes were behind politically motivated leaks of classified intelligence, former president Barack Obama was also in the know.

'Former State Department colleagues of mine have been talking about Susan Rice's role for weeks,' Richard Grenell told DailyMail.com on Monday

'She and her team certainly were hyper-partisan throughout their tenure. It makes sense.'

Grenell did not disclose who his former colleagues are.

Rice is the Obama administration official whose name became a punchline after her repeated false claims that the 2012 Benghazi terror attacks were caused by a crude Internet video.

When U.S. intelligence services conduct surveillance of foreign targets, it's possible that American citizens can be swept up in recorded conversations, intercepted emails or other surveillance. That can happen when Americans who are not targets of an investigation are 'incidentally' captured talking to a target. it can also occur when targets merely mention them during a conversation or in a document. When this happens, intelligence analysts routinely delete the Americans' names and replace them with vague identifiers like 'U.S. Person Number One' or 'Person A' – masking their identity from other government officials who may look at reports. Senior intelligence officials can request the 'unmasking' of those names under certain circumstances, but that creates a risk that the names will be leaked.

From her position as chief of the National Security Council last year, according to a Bloomberg report, Rice asked government agencies to identify names that had been withheld from raw intelligence reports linked with Trump campaign and transition figures.

There is not necessarily anything illegal or unusual about a national security advisor seeking to unmask names in raw reports, in order to fully understand the meaning of intercepted conversations.

But leaking those names to people who lack the security clearance to view the source documents is a federal felony.

One such criminal leak involved Gen. Michael Flynn – Rice's short-lived successor – whose name was leaked to a reporter just days into the Trump administration.

Routine surveillance conducted on phone conversations of Russia's U.S. ambassador Sergey Kislyak revealed that he had been talking with Flynn.

Flynn was later forced out of office following reports that he had failed to acknowledge those conversations included talk of the potential for relaxing U.S. sanctions on Moscow.

The controversy reached public scandal level when a partial transcript of one call was leaked to a Washington Post columnist.

Grenell has served as a spokesman to three different U.S. Permanent Representatives to the United Nations, including Ambassador John Bolton's tenure under President George W. Bush.

He was the first to raise Rice's name in conjunction with the unmasking of Americans' names during the final year of the Obama administration, along with that of Rhodes, the former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications.

'The Obama team is claiming that this is a safe legal issue because they were supposedly trying to listen to foreigners,' Grenell said during a March 24 Fox News Channel 'Hannity' broadcast.

'But within that realm there could have easily been a political calculation to listen in, and then to take those transcripts and the summaries of those transcripts, make sure that those in the NSC and the political people – like Ben Rhodes and Susan Rice – make sure that they have them so they can leak them to reporters.'

'I think that it would be easy to figure out if Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes knew about this,' he added, 'because if they did, clearly President Obama knew about it.'

'That's the political team inside the NSC. They would have been trying to help do something against Trump during the election. So I think let's just figure out if they knew, and we'll have something leading to a political scheme.'

Grenell said on 'Hannity' that what started out as an 'unintentional sweep' that snagged Trump campaign personnel in an intelligence net ultimately morphed into 'intentional' leaks.

He added that he had received intelligence briefings every day for eight years while he worked at the UN, and never once saw raw transcripts of phone intercepts.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer declined to pile on Susan Rice during his Monday afternoon press briefing.

'I'm not going to start going down that road,' he said.

Grenell's expected nomination to lead the U.S. NATO mission has appeared stalled for the past four weeks since the first word of it emerged.

But a White House aide said Monday that the administration is viewing it with a renewed sense of urgency in order to get him confirmed before a May 24-25 NATO summit in Brussels, Belgium.

President Donald Trump is expected to participate in that event on its second day.
Media reports indicate that former National Security Advisor Susan Rice improperly requested the unmasking of some American names, including those of Donald Trump's campaign staff, that had been incidentally collected during national security investigations. A National Security Adviser may request unmasking if specific criteria are met. A Rice associate denies that the unmasking was improper.