Obama National Security Adviser Ordered Unmasking Trumpites

[pErvinalia]

[Brian Peacock]

[pErvinalia]

[Forty Two]

@42
As the national security advisor to the president Rice would have to convince the intelligence agency that the detail was necessary 'to understanding the context and/or content of the material' provided for review. The agency assess that claim and make a decision accordingly. If a request is refused and contested there is a closed arbitration process for dealing with it.

A request was not refused in this case, so that's irrelevant. The issue is why the request was made in the first place.

What I'm saying is that what Rice did was unremarkable,

But is it unremarkable? When asked about alleged unmasking of Trump transition officials a few weeks ago on PBS, she said that she knew "nothing" about it. But once it was publicly reported that she had personally requested such unmasking on "dozens" of occasions, Rice has shifted to arguing that she did nothing improper and did not leak any classified material.

“From my direct experience dealing at this level, that is never done,” retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer told Fox News. Shaffer has experience in intelligence operations focused on foreign actors in which U.S. citizens’ involvement could surface. “The national security adviser person is a manager position, not an analyst position,” he said. “You have analysts in the intelligence community whose job is to sort through who is doing what with what. Susan Rice is a senior manager looking over the entire intelligence community. She should not have time to be unmasking individuals having conversations. It’s insane. It’s never done.” Ex-CIA analyst Fred Fleitz agreed in a Fox News op-ed. “Rice’s denials don’t add up,” Fleitz wrote. “It is hard to fathom how the demasking of multiple Trump campaign and transition officials was not politically motivated.”

Former Ambassador to the United Nations and Fox News contributor John Bolton told “America’s Newsroom” that Rice’s requests may have been improper depending on what reason she gave for wanting the information. “Now I’m not naïve, a national security adviser’s gonna get her request approved. But she still has to give some reason,” said Bolton, who served under former President George W. Bush. “If she doesn’t even have to give a reason than NSA is really quite negligent. Susan Rice is obviously not gonna say, ‘I want these names unmasked so I can surveil my political opponents.’ And if she said she wanted the names unmasked for national security reasons, that’s a fraud on the intelligence system.” Shaffer said a U.S. citizen’s interaction with a foreign target is not typically reason enough to unmask an American.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/4 ... bi-cia-nsa

The thing to bear in mind is that the White House does not do investigations. Not criminal investigations, not intelligence investigations. Remember that...There would have been no intelligence need for Susan Rice to ask for identities to be unmasked. If there had been a real need to reveal the identities — an intelligence need based on American interests — the unmasking would have been done by the investigating agencies. The national-security adviser is not an investigator. She is a White House staffer. The president’s staff is a consumer of intelligence, not a generator or collector of it. If Susan Rice was unmasking Americans, it was not to fulfill an intelligence need based on American interests; it was to fulfill a political desire based on Democratic-party interests...

At a high level, officials like Susan Rice had names unmasked that would not ordinarily be unmasked. That information was then being pushed widely throughout the intelligence community in unmasked form . . . particularly after Obama, toward the end of his presidency, suddenly — and seemingly apropos of nothing — changed the rules so that all of the intelligence agencies (not just the collecting agencies) could have access to raw intelligence information. As we know, the community of intelligence agencies leaks like a sieve, and the more access there is to juicy information, the more leaks there are. Meanwhile, former Obama officials and Clinton-campaign advisers, like [Evelyn] Farkas, were pushing to get the information transferred from the intelligence community to members of Congress, geometrically increasing the likelihood of intelligence leaks.

The reality is that it is remarkable for Rice to have made this request. Or, at least, some high level intelligence people and prosecutors are saying so. So, if the usual or unremarkable nation of the national security adviser is at issue, I guess we have to go out and look to see if similar requests were periodically and commonly made.

and unless Trump has signed an executive order I'm not aware of, the same conditionality applies to the current presidential national security advisor. What is remarkable is the attempt to make political capital out of such scant pickigs, and perhaps that this has all boiled up the day after Bannon was booted off the joint intelligence advisory committee. I'm not saying that that fact in itself cast doubts about the providence of the information, but the timing is interesting and the spin from Breibart et al is certainly co-ordinated and consistent. That is... curious, to say the least.

You fell for these kind of irrelevant 'concerns' with the released report summary on Russian involvement in the election - something pretty much everybody agrees happened.

Umm..."almost everyone" does not agree that the allegations are true about Russia specifically helping Trump or committing the "hacking." The report was crafted in a way to muddle that issue with the issue of Russia's longstanding practice of trying to fuck with the United States. That's another issue, though.

In any case, I didn't "fall for" any concerns in that regard. I read the report on "Russian involvement" in the election, and I've posted on that elsewhere. Most of that report was referring to Russian propaganda. About a page, or less, involved any hacking, and there was no evidence - just a reference to "consistent with methods..." That's it. No matter how much it's spun, that report just didn't contain anything substantial.

The problem here is that the Republicans and Trump are doing their best to make the investigation into the extent of Russian interference and Trump's connections with Russia a partisan issue. It isn't - or at least it shouldn't be.

The Democrats made it a partisan issue when they tried to paint Trump as in league with Putin and essentially a traitor.

At the moment the Republican/Trump response to questions about whether Trump may have done a bad thing is to simply declare that Obama did a bad things too. You do realise that this line of argument seeks to legitimise turpitude on the basis of someone else's turpitude don't you? Are you comfortable with that kind of childishness being played out on this stage in this manner?

The way I see it, it's that the Obama administration didn't just do "bad things too," but rather that those bad things were directly related to ginning up the notion that Trump was in league with Putin and the Russians. They wanted to make it look like Trump was in communication with the Russians about the election and participating in Russian efforts to undermine the Democrats. That's the Democrat line.

This latest mess is yet another reason why an independent special prosecutor with powers to subpoena should be chairing a cross-party commission into the Trump-Russia business. Republican voters have just as much stake in knowing if and how their democratic systems might have been compromised or undermined as Democrat voters - and both should be asking their elected representatives to support such an independent commission.

How about Rice just explain why she claimed to have no knowledge of it, and to explain why she requested the information (what was the purpose and the intelligence need - what investigation did it involve)?

[Brian Peacock]

A request was not refused in this case, so that's irrelevant. The issue is why the request was made in the first place.

Is it irrelevant to be aware of the process?

But is it unremarkable?

Yes.

When asked about alleged unmasking of Trump transition officials a few weeks ago on PBS, she said that she knew "nothing" about it.

A security official keeps shtum about security matters shock. Pictures at eleven.

But once it was publicly reported that she had personally requested such unmasking on "dozens" of occasions, Rice has shifted to arguing that she did nothing improper and did not leak any classified material.

It does not follow that because she didn't talk about it before, or spontaneously place the information in the public domain, then she acted improperly.

The thing to bear in mind is that the White House does not do investigations. Not criminal investigations, not intelligence investigations. Remember that.

I'll bear that in mind, if you'll bear in mind that for the president's security advisor to review material passed to them by the security and intelligence agencies is not to undertake intelligence 'analysis' nor to engage in an investigation.

There would have been no intelligence need for Susan Rice to ask for identities to be unmasked.

Really? How can you be so sure? If, for example, a national security advisor was aware that individuals and/or organisations working within the political domain might be linked, even in passing, with individuals being investigation for possible collusion with a foreign aggressor, would it not be important for the executive branch to know, at the very least, who these people were? Knowing that is not to make an inference about guilt or innocence, it doesn't entail intelligence analysis or initiate and investigation, but it would have an impact on the flow of executive information to and from those individuals in the political domain while an investigation was ongoing.

For example only: if, for quite innocent and innocuous reasons, a member of Congress happened to be at a meeting between a member of the Trump campaign and a foreign operative that was contemporaneously surveilled, even if they departed before anything of consequence happened, wouldn't it still be important for the executive to be aware of that fact and to take account of it in the information flow to and from the White House with respect to that member of The House? Even if the meeting was not surveilled but merely reported to have taken place--"Subjects A & B entered the building with REDACTED at 10:15. REDACTED departed the premisses via the main entrance at 10:34. A & B exited by South door at 11:42 and engaged in a brief conversation in the parking lot before shaking hands and departing at 11:46 in their own vehicles"--the flow of information between the executive branches and REDACTED would have to be addressed.

All I'm saying is that identities are certainly 'masked' for a reason, and they are 'unmasked' for other reasons, and the application of incredulity to the circumstances of this case is, on the whole, irrelevant and misleading (which, I fear, is the whole point of this concern trolling from alt-right and far-right outlets who are promoting these 'issues').

The other point from your snippets rests on the fact that an unmasking request from the president's security advisor carries the de facto force of a direct order, presumably by the authority of the president themselves. But does it? It would entail that things like the law and agreed procedure do not apply to the office of the president. Do you think that is actually case here?

The remarks of John Bolton presume this 'you just can't say no to the presidents security adviser' argument--which at the least seem to imply that these types of requests are not unheard of--while addressing presumptions, indeed assumptions, about political motivations. In short, the remarks presume there are no legitimate reasons for a national security advisor to ever ask for the unmasking of masked identities in such circumstances. I think that's bogus, and I'll tell you for why. Now before you jump in, bear with me a moment.

We have to remember that security and intelligence agencies were investigating possible connections between members of Trump's team and the operatives of a foreign aggressor well before the election along with impact of certain types of foreign (or possibly domestic) interference with the election campaign. We also know now that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had a robust and longstanding relationship with the Russian government, both in overseeing the successful election of Putin's favoured proxy in Ukraine and in his $10m pa retainer to lobby and promote Russian political interests in the US. We also found out post-inauguration that Flynn and Session both had a number of off-the-books meetings with Russian representatives during the campaign and transition period, and lied about it. This investigation is, I'm sure you'll agree, the necessary context which needs to be kept to the fore here.

We can safely presume that the president's security advisor was reviewing reports relating to the ongoing investigations in her 'managerial' role, and that sometime towards the end of the transition period she asked , in Fleitz's terms, that "multiple Trump campaign and transition officials" be unmasked in security and intelligence reports. Even Bolton acknowledges that such requests have to be justified on national security grounds. Do you see where I'm going with this?

Not only were named individuals among the Trump team under direct investigation (Sessions? Flynn? Manafort? Trump himself?? - we don't know, but it doesn't really matter) but 'multiple transition officials' (at the very least Flynn and Sessions, presumably) were swept up in those investigation. It is impossible to imagine that the ongoing investigation into possible connections between an incoming political entity and a foreign power did not, or would not, have an impact on how the outgoing administration managed the transition. What form that took isn't clear, but one can imagine that access which was routinely afforded to incoming transition officials might be limited if they were under investigation or if there was a question mark next to their name, or perhaps explicit directives were issued (So-and-so should not be granted access to the computer system, department heads should not have one-to-one meeting with such-and-such, Thingumy and Thongumy will not have access to the president's office, etc). Who knows? However, to claim that there was no, is no, nor that there can never be, a national security justification for Rice's requests is unrealistic and, frankly, somewhat unduly partisan.

By December, Rice was obviously working for a defeated, outgoing administration, but that does not mean that a departing administration foregoes any responsibility for national security matters. Of course, they must prepare the ground for others to take charge, but until that time they would be negligent in their duty to not manage the flow of certain information in, out, or through the executive machinery.

The charge that Rice's requests were a politically motivated action directing the resources of the state against political opponents is to make much too much out of a happenstance (that being, that those under investigation, along with those associated 'multiple transition officials', were representing the political opposition to the outgoing administration), and yet when taken at face value this charge completely ignores (deliberately so imo) the fact that certain members of Trump's transition team were (and are) under investigations and/or having clandestine, off-the-books meeting with foreign operatives which, unsurprisingly, at least two of them went on to lie about in front of Congress and the American public.

So, in these circumstance I have to disagree and say that far from there being "no intelligence need for Susan Rice to ask for identities to be unmasked" there was a national security obligation for the outgoing administration to know who was under investigation, who had a question mark next to their names, and who was, shall we say, a mere coincidental party swept up in the wider matter.

Moving on...

The Democrats made it a partisan issue when they tried to paint Trump as in league with Putin and essentially a traitor.

Nobody knows the extent of any possible Trump-Russia connections, but as the matter raises fundamental issues to do with the robustness, independence, and security of the US's democratic processes and institutions it effects everyone in the US equally. There's no need to be high-handed here, the mere possibility that there's "credible evidence" (FBI) that the Trump campaign was being aided by a antagonistic foreign power, even indirectly, with the aim of undermining the US's democratic process, and at worst with the aim of ensuring the election of an administration favoured by, and favourable to, Moscow, is alarming enough to warrant anyone's concern. In which case...

The way I see it, it's that the Obama administration didn't just do "bad things too," but rather that those bad things were directly related to ginning up the notion that Trump was in league with Putin and the Russians. They wanted to make it look like Trump was in communication with the Russians about the election and participating in Russian efforts to undermine the Democrats. That's the Democrat line.

...this is another reason that this should be investigated independently, outside of the usual partisan kicking match that passes for political discourse. But let's not forget that the Trump campaign was definitely the beneficiary of someone's "efforts to undermine the Democrats," and whoever that was don't you think it's important, as well as going beyond political partisanship, to pin down as many of the objective facts as possible about an apparent attempt at a rather brazen manipulation of the democratic process, regardless of it's ultimate effects?

Well, I guess not, because you simply ignored that point and side-stepped that issue entirely. I really feel Repbulifans should be calling for an independent commission on this. I mean, if can happen once it can happen again right?

But I fear that once the idea has been planted and primed no amount of explanation from Rice will ever be good enough for either the alt- or far-right, let alone regular FOXNEWS-watching Republicans, or even for you for that matter. There's nothing that feeds the flames of a conspiracy theory more than an absence of facts, and once that fire takes hold no amount of facts can quell the 'no smoke without fire' justification for ignoring them.

I'm still interested in any thoughts you might have about where the information about Rice came from, how it found its way into the alt-media, about how that appeared so co-ordinated, and what effect this story is having on right-leaning public opinion concerning the ongoing security and intelligence agency investigations as well as those by the House Intelligence and Ethics committees.

[Brian Peacock]

[Brian Peacock]

[Hermit]

Patience, dears. 42's partner disapproves of the social side of the internet and is a bit of a control freak, so he can only duck in here once in a while.

[pErvinalia]

Brian is actually another of Coito's socks...

[Brian Peacock]

I resemble that

Actually, I'm just engaging in a Socratic discourse for your elucidation. You can thank me with money.

[Brian Peacock]

Recently, several members and staffers on the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russia’s role in the Presidential election, visited the National Security Agency, in Fort Meade, Maryland. Inside the enormous black glass headquarters of America’s largest spy agency, the congressmen and their aides were shown a binder of two to three dozen pages of highly classified intercepts, mostly transcripts of conversations between foreign government officials that took place during the Presidential transition. These intercepts were not related to the heart of the committee’s Russia investigation. In fact, only one of the documents had anything to do with Russia, according to an official who reviewed them.

What the intercepts all had in common is that the people being spied on made references to Donald Trump or to Trump officials. That wasn’t even clear, though, from reading the transcripts. The names of any Americans were concealed, or “masked,” the intelligence community’s term for redacting references to Americans who are not the legal targets of surveillance when such intelligence reports are distributed to policy makers.

The binder of secret documents is at the center of the bizarre scandal created by what may be the most reckless lie President Trump has ever told. On March 4th, he tweeted, “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” The White House made several efforts to justify Trump’s claim, including using Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, as a conduit for the documents, which allegedly offered some substantiation. A former Nunes staffer now working for the White House dug up the transcripts and shared them with Nunes. As Bloomberg View reported, earlier this month, Susan Rice, Obama’s national-security adviser, had used a process that allowed her to request that the masked names be revealed to her. Rice had to log her unmasking requests on a White House computer, which is how Trump’s aides knew about them. Nunes and the White House presented this as a major scandal. “I think the Susan Rice thing is a massive story,” Trump told the Times, adding, while offering no evidence, that Rice may have committed a crime.

It is now clear that the scandal was not Rice’s normal review of the intelligence reports but the coördinated effort between the Trump Administration and Nunes to sift through classified information and computer logs that recorded Rice’s unmasking requests, and then leak a highly misleading characterization of those documents, all in an apparent effort to turn Rice, a longtime target of Republicans, into the face of alleged spying against Trump. It was a series of lies to manufacture a fake scandal. Last week, CNN was the first to report that both Democrats and Republicans who reviewed the Nunes material at the N.S.A. said that the documents provided “no evidence that Obama Administration officials did anything unusual or illegal.”

I spoke to two intelligence sources, one who read the entire binder of intercepts and one who was briefed on their contents. “There’s absolutely nothing there,” one source said. The Trump names remain masked in the documents, and Rice would not have been able to know in all cases that she was asking the N.S.A. to unmask the names of Trump officials.

Nunes is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee because, in talking about the documents, he may have leaked classified information. But this is like getting Al Capone for tax evasion. The bigger scandal is the coördinated effort to use the American intelligence services to manufacture an excuse for Trump’s original tweet.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizz ... ke-scandal

[my bold]

The House Ethics Committee comes under the purview of The Justice Department, the activity of which is overseen by long time Trump stalwart, and massive liar, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III - so any 'ethical' investigation of Nunes is going to amount to about the same as one into the president's emoluments or conflicts of interest, that is: not very much.

[Brian Peacock]

[Brian Peacock]

All of a sudden there's nobody defending the proposition. Like so much real fake news it now exists inside its own bubble, floating around the politicosphere in the guise of a vague, half remembered factoid while remaining completely disconnected from reality.

[pErvinalia]

[Hermit]

All of a sudden there's nobody defending the proposition. Like so much real fake news it now exists inside its own bubble, floating around the politicosphere in the guise of a vague, half rememvered factoid while remaining completely disconnected from reality.

It's a bit like trying to get dotty dave to make further comments on the pizzagate story he mentioned earlier as if it was a true event. Or 4.2 to react when his comment about communism was burnt to the ground.