(Susan Rice, former National Security Adviser)
Washington Post:
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.”The problem here is not that she leaked information, but declassified ("unmasked") names of people who got caught up in data collections of individuals under investigation. By unmasking those names, she basically changed them from "incidental collections" to "under investigation". But why would she do that only for associates of Donald Trump?
“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.
The problem is Rice has a long history of lying for the Obama administration. She was the one who originally said the Benghazi attack was due to a "heinous video" instead of an attack by Islamists, which was the real story. This was done to cover for the fact the U.S. government wasn't having much success against the terrorists, because the Benghazi attack happened to occur before a presidential election. Democrats will do anything to win an election, because they are so self-righteous about their cause, anything is justified to reach their ends.
Keep this in mind as you read the following:
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.Consider that while reading the following:
“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.”
Daily Caller:
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.A whole year before the election? Did they do this only for Trump, or for all of the Republican candidates? Trump was a leading candidate at the time.
“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.
But here is why this is a big deal:
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.This is the equivalent of using the NSA to commit the Watergate break-in. It is quite illegal, and it also demonstrates why we cannot trust the government to do the right thing with mass data collection.
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.”
In other news...
CNN Money:
Whether or not Obamacare will explode in the near future is a matter of debate.It is ironic that the health insurance industry would just walk away from a system that was built implicitly for them, thereby leaving entire swaths of people uninsured, which was the other purpose of Obamacare.
But if it does, it likely wouldn't be a massive death spiral across all 50 states. It would die in specific regions because all the insurers there pull out.
Knoxville, Tennessee, may be the first place where Obamacare fails. Humana (HUM), the only insurer on the exchange there, is exiting the market in 2018. Unless another carrier steps in, roughly 40,000 people in the 16 counties in and around Knoxville could be left without the option to buy a subsidized insurance policy.
The lack of competition on many of the exchanges is one of Obamacare's biggest problems. One in five consumers have only one choice this year, up from 2% in 2016, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Pinal County in Arizona almost became the first Obamacare casualty last year after Aetna (AET)scaled back its participation. But the Obama administration and state regulators worked to bring Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona back to that area, said Cynthia Cox, associate director at the Kaiser Family Foundation. It had pulled out earlier.
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