Susan Rice and the unmasking
The media is full of articles about Obama’s national security advisor Susan Rice’s role in “unmasking” the names of Trump transition officials in U.S. intelligence reports. See this, for example:
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.
“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.”
Scandals are in the eye of the beholders these days. This particular activity of Rice’s should surprise no one who’s been following politics for the last decade or two, and particularly during the Obama years (when, to my way of thinking, the MSM was “unmasked” as being fully engaged in the business of covering up for anything the Obama administration might do, just as they are now engaged in doing the opposite re Trump). One of the saddest things about this particular report is that I doubt anyone is shocked by it, nor are we shocked by the failure of most of the MSM to condemn it or in some cases to even report it.
I actually thought the IRS scandal was even worse, and look what happened there. Liberals and the left fell right in line.
The President spies on a candidate for President and then leaks the info in order to smear his successor. This is a big deal despite what Don Lemon says.
Watergate was bush league compared to what is unfolding now. And the consequences were
one presidential resignation
40 government officials indicted or jailed
H.R. Haldeman and John Erlichman (White House staff), resigned 30 April 1973, subsequently jailed
John Dean (White House legal counsel), sacked 30 April 1973, subsequently jailed
John Mitchell, Attorney-General and Chairman of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), jailed
Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy (ex-White House staff), planned the Watergate break-in, both jailed
Charles Colson, special counsel to the President, jailed
James McCord (Security Director of CREEP), jailed
The long term repercussions of this are of the utmost seriousness, as it is the prelude to a police state. When next the democrats attain the Presidency does anyone here think that they will not once again engage in using the government to illegally destroy their opponents?
“the erasure of the American Republic is [has become] the core agenda of the Democrat Party” David Horowitz
There is a report out that Rice began doing this in November of 2015. If true, that tells me she was doing this on behalf of HRC and her campaign since it’s considerably before Trump was considered a serious candidate (neo excepted 🙂 ) and she was spying on Democratic candidates as well, e.g., Bernie.
Speculation, but we’ll see.
This is a big deal, but then Benghazi was a big deal, the IRS tax scandal was a big deal, etc.
Maybe it makes a difference this time around Trump is Prez and it’s his DOJ.
Maybe.
I would say this Rice story is definitely in the eye of the [partisan] beholder. More information is needed. Bloomberg claims that there is no evidence that Rice had done anything illegal. Now that does not mean she didn’t. But I’d like an independent journalist / media outlet to dig deeper rather than listen to Mike Cernovich or Breitbart with their bias or CNN with their bias.
Montage: If Watergate was a big deal, this is a big deal.
What independent journalists/media outlet do you have in mind?
Dan Rather? CNN?
huxley:
Maybe Montage wants Julian Assange to look into it? 🙂
Things don’t look good for Susan “Pinocchio” Rice. We need a bigger dose of that suspension of disbelief medication.
We are all impatient and want answers on this “right now!”.
This provides opportunity for speculation about what and why people have done what they have. After all, there is no immediate explanation for a lot of strange behavior around all this Russia stuff.
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The obama admin hasn’t exactly given us confidence that they are beyond reproach when it comes to unusual behavior, which may well indicate, if not lead to discovering, some misbehavior.
The trump admin hasn’t really been forthright with their contacts with notable Russians, and has been behaving rather unusually as well.
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After the 2012 and especially the 2016 election, it no longer bothers me nearly so much that the msm are biased (and that they don’t report on rice “unmasking”). They are very much who they predictably are.
If the “conservative” media wasn’t as abundant, and didn’t have as strong a voice, sure, there’d be much to be concerned about.
Worrying about how biased the msm is has become a distraction.
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There definitely a struggle between the msm / left and “conservativet” media / right on “control” of the narrative.
Focus on the bias in the msm (aside from promoting a victimhood message) blinds us to what should be MOST bothersome…
That NEITHER narrative seems to be addressing the core issue:
What and how much was putin’s/russia’s hand behind the hacks, the wikileaks, and other attempts to influence our politics?
Just how exposed are we to Russian meddling in our political life?
What can we (our government, we as citizens) do to prevent or mitigate this?
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Not all of these questions will be answered by the investigations, but I expect the facts will more definitively point the finger at russia, perhaps indicating some answer to what should be done.
But, I also expect that answers to support either narrative will prove frustratingly elusive (probably because there is much speculation behind those narratives, and those narratives will live on simply because they are meant to serve other purposes – and make for great drama / ratings in each team’s media).
One of the more interesting points that I have seen made about this in the last day is that, as a National Security Advisor, neither Susan Rice nor anyone else in her position, would be an investigative officer or detective.
The National Security Advisor’s role would be as a consumer of finished product intelligence reports, not the role of someone who went out and investigated the raw information that, when collected and analyzed, made up the substance of the reports she would be reading.
Such detailed investigation, reportedly for over a year, was simply not her job, nor one that she would normally have time for.
So, why would she be viewing all this raw intelligence data, over such a long period of time, and asking for these Americans–reportedly more than a few–caught up in surveillance, supposedly of foreigners, to be unmasked?
My fear is that a special prosecutor will be named, much money and time will be invested, and nothing will come of it all. Susan Rice has lied to the America people before, and she will either lie under oath or fall back on that well-practiced Democrat response: “I don’t remember.” The MSM (I hate to use that term, but it has a well-accepted meaning) will join forces with Democrats in and out of government to focus doubt and skepticism on the prosecutor and his proceedings. And no matter what the outcome, it will not satisfy not convince anyone one way or the other. The only outcome that would be satisfying would be for Rice to give it all up at some point and say yes, she did indeed conspire to subvert Trump’s presidency, and name the persons with whom she conspired. Susan McDougal shows the opposite approach: stonewall and lie until you finally go to jail. I don’t see Rice doing that, mainly because I don’t believe a special prosecutor would go after her with the same zeal as Kenneth Starr. I hope I am wrong. Only time will tell.
Ah, that’s so sweet, you’re really becoming a hispanic/mediterranean country!!
Don’t worry for the future. China will take care of it.
Welcome! 🙂
Susan Rice was a political appointee who reported to President Obama, so what are the odds that Obama didn’t direct her in what she was doing, or didn’t see the results of her work?
The obama admin hasn’t exactly given us confidence that they are beyond reproach when it comes to unusual behavior, which may well indicate, if not lead to discovering, some misbehavior.
The trump admin hasn’t really been forthright with their contacts with notable Russians, and has been behaving rather unusually as well.
Big Maq: I appreciate your efforts to be even-handed. However, unless something is seriously bent in what I read, Susan Rice has been caught red-handed and it’s “all she wrote” for those paying attention. Which may not/probably not matter in the wildly skewed MSM discussions, but there we are.
Meanwhile, the Dems and MSM have had months and months to nail Trump on Russian collusion — which is what Rice was up to in weaponizing the NSA after all — but come up with nothing in spite of their throwing amazing amounts of stuff at the wall.
Trump has babbled a number of unfortunate soundbites flattering Putin, but at this point I conclude Trump is basically innocent. If they coulda got Trump, they woulda. To cement that, Trump jettisoned Manafort and Flynn.
Works for me.
Jim Geraghty of the much-maligned Never-Trump National Review has a good wrap-up on Susan Rice:
On January 12, when Susan Rice and all of her deputies were still in their jobs, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius cited a source that was a “a senior U.S. government official” declaring that Michael “Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29.”
That information and the contents of the call are classified; whoever leaked the information to Ignatius committed a crime. Rice denies leaking the information. Of course, she also insisted the Benghazi attack was a “spontaneous protest” and denied that it was “premeditated or preplanned”; and that Bowe Bergdahl served the United States with “honor and distinction.” Maybe it was her, maybe it wasn’t, but no one with any sense should trust her denial; saying otherwise would be admitting to a crime.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/446451/i-know-nothing-about-eh-wait-nevermind
Mike Cernovich, the reporter who broke the Susan Rice story, writes today that, contrary to speculations that he got his information from some insider in the intelligence community, he actually got his information from his sources in the newsrooms of the New York Times and Bloomberg, who have long known all about what Rice was doing, but sat on the story so as not to damage the former Obama Administration, it’s members, and it’s legacy.
FWIW, Mike Cernovich is the alt-right fellow who came up with the charming term “cuckservative” which so enriched political discussions in 2016.
https://www.dangerandplay.com/2015/12/07/cuckservative-what-is-a-cuck-who-is-a-cuck/
Good job on the Susan Rice story though.