April 3, 2017

BREAKING: The Villainous Susan Rice Is In the News Yet Again

Pete Souza/The White House via ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


The sequence of spin and dissimulation in the great Trump wiretapping affair has been a master class in…something. I’m not quite sure what yet. But it’s worth setting out for future generations. To get the ball rolling and remind everyone how this got started, here is Trump’s original tweet from a month ago:

There’s nothing true about this. Trump got it from a Breitbart piece that summarized a Mark Levin rant that relied on a British story about a brief FBI investigation of a server at Trump Tower that was communicating with a Russian bank. He couldn’t admit that, though, and thus began a long campaign that has sucked up the time of the White House, Republicans in Congress, and Fox News, all desperately trying to redefine this into a real story. Here’s how it went:

  1. Obama became some part of the executive branch.
  2. Wiretap became surveillance of some kind.
  3. Trump Tower became Trump.
  4. Trump became anyone associated with Trump.
  5. Surveillance became criminal investigation of Trump campaign team. Oops. Wrong turn. Let’s ditch that one.
  6. Second try: surveillance became routine monitoring of foreign officials that happened to include Trump officials on the other end.
  7. Routine monitoring became unmasking of Trump officials.

And now we have the latest version of this from Eli Lake:

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.

….Rice’s requests to unmask the names of Trump transition officials does 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….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.

Susan Rice, recall, was the National Security Advisor at the time, and most likely requested unmasking of names from intelligence reports all the time. Apparently some of those times included Trump transition officials. How many times? “Dozens.” How does that compare to her usual number of requests? There’s no telling. Does this have anything to do with Trump’s original tweet? No. Was it illegal or wrong in any way? Probably not.

But! Susan Rice is also a Republican bête noir, the villainess of Benghazi who LIED ON TV repeatedly and tried to get everyone to believe that the attacks were due to an INTERNET VIDEO when we knew all along they were really the work of RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISTS, a phrase that OBAMA WAS UNWILLING TO UTTER.

So it’s a big win to get Rice’s name back in the news. So far, though, it doesn’t advance the story in any way. Maybe it will eventually. As usual, we’ll just have to wait.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate