Mel B claims her estranged husband Stephen Belafonte got the nanny PREGNANT https://t.co/vA7AEnmXxq pic.twitter.com/obatuwYyIv— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) April 5, 2017
Former President Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice asked for the names of Trump transition officials to be unmasked and made public in raw intelligence files, according to media reports, a move apparently carried out to harm the incoming Trump administration.Keep reading.
As recently as March 22, Rice denied knowing anything about the intelligence reports. In an appearance on “PBS Newshour,” she said pretty definitely, “I know nothing about this.” The new news reports paint Rice as a liar.
The evidence we know about in the Trump-Russia saga so far seems to be pointing at Obama.
Adam Housley of Fox News reports:
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 spreading of the unmasked names was carried out for “political purposes that have nothing to do with national security” or foreign intelligence, Housley said. "It had everything to do with hurting and embarrassing Trump and his team," he said, citing his sources.
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.
What is incidental collection, by the way?
Incidental collection “happens when an individual is in contact with the target of surveillance,” or is communicating “about” the target, according to Robyn Greene. “So if Bob were being targeted for surveillance and Alice called or emailed Bob, Alice’s communications with him would be collected incidentally.”
In this example, “if Bob is targeted for surveillance and Alice contacts him during that surveillance, resulting in the incidental collection of her communications with him, her name should be redacted or ‘masked’ unless leaving it unredacted provides foreign intelligence value.” Masking is done to protect U.S. persons (i.e. U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, etc.) who get inadvertently caught up in the electronic dragnet from being falsely accused of crimes or otherwise improper behavior.
If a National Security Agency analyst “believes Alice’s communications may contain evidence of any crime, the NSA can share those communications with law enforcement or other relevant agencies … even if the crimes are completely unrelated to the purpose for surveilling Bob’s communications, or to foreign intelligence or national security investigations.”
According to former Obama State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf, “if the intelligence community professionals decide that there’s some value, national security, foreign policy or otherwise in unmasking someone, they will grant those requests,”
Assuming these news reports about data that supposedly was incidentally collected are accurate, they raise a multitude of new questions about the ongoing scandal concerning alleged collaboration between the Trump team and Russia.
We still don’t know who asked then-National Security Advisor Susan Rice to unmask those names – or if she acted on her own initiative. But the most likely culprit has to be President Obama himself, along with those in his inner circle such as his Islamist CIA director John Brennan and his slimy national-security aide Ben Rhodes.
But whoever did the deed, it appears someone used America’s taxpayer-funded national security apparatus to engage in likely unlawful espionage against an opposition presidential campaign, an incoming administration, and that administration’s transition team. It’s the stuff of banana republics, which makes sense, because Obama spent eight long, lawless years trying to turn the United States into precisely that...
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Susan Rice sought the name of at least one Trump official in intelligence reports: https://t.co/txUIgCElLY— WSJ Editorial Page (@WSJopinion) April 4, 2017
Well, what do you know. On the matter of who “unmasked” the names of Trump transition officials in U.S. intelligence reports, we now have one answer: Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s national security adviser.More.
A U.S. intelligence official confirms to us the bombshell news, first reported Monday by Bloomberg, that Ms. Rice requested the name of at least one Trump transition official listed in an intelligence report in the months between Election Day and Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Ms. Rice received summaries of U.S. eavesdropping either when foreign officials were discussing the Trump team, or when foreign officials were conversing with a Trump transition member. The surveillance was legally authorized, but the identities of U.S. citizens are typically masked so they cannot be known outside intelligence circles. Ms. Rice asked for and learned the identity of the Trump official, whose name hasn’t been publicly disclosed and our source declined to share.
Our source did confirm that Ms. Rice also examined dozens of other intelligence summaries that technically masked Trump official identities but were written in such a way as to make obvious who those officials were. This means that the masking was essentially meaningless. All this is highly unusual—and troubling. Unmasking does occur, but it is typically done by intelligence or law-enforcement officials engaged in antiterror or espionage investigations. Ms. Rice would have had no obvious need to unmask Trump campaign officials other than political curiosity.
We’re told by a source who has seen the unmasked documents that they included political information about the Trump transition team’s meetings and policy intentions. We are also told that none of these documents had anything to do with Russia or the FBI investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. While we don’t know if Ms. Rice requested these dozens of reports, we are told that they were only distributed to a select group of recipients—conveniently including Ms. Rice.
All of this helps to explain the actions in the last week of House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, the one official in Washington who seems interested in pursuing the evidence of politicized surveillance. Mr. Nunes was roundly criticized by Democrats and the media last week for publicly revealing at least one instance of Obama White House unmasking, albeit without disclosing any names.
Now we know he is onto something. And we know that Mr. Nunes had to go to the White House to verify his information because the records containing Ms. Rice’s unmasking request are held at the National Security Council...
Report: New Head of Federal Anti-Rape Agency Is a ‘Libertarian Feminist’ and Clinton Critic; Candice Jackson will allegedly become deputy secretary at the Office for Civil Rights. “A conservative legal activist known for defending the women who accused President Bill Clinton of sexual harassment has been tapped to head the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights on a temporary basis. OCR is the agency that regulates Title IX compliance, and is responsible for the recent effort to compel schools to police sexual assault internally.”
#BetYouDidntExpect #SusanRice Top Obama Adviser Sought Names of Trump Associates in Intel President Trump is right again and again🙂👍 pic.twitter.com/YD02Z0rkNk— CindyForTrump (@immigrant_legal) April 3, 2017
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.Keep reading.
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...
Will fury and heaps of Democratic cash be enough to get political neophyte Jon Ossoff elected to Congress? https://t.co/yJ3GTKyYKP— New York Magazine (@NYMag) April 3, 2017
In all senses, the sun was shining on Jon Ossoff. It was early in the evening on a Sunday in late March, and the suddenly very visible 30-year-old Democratic candidate in the first competitive special congressional election of the Trump era was riding shotgun in a sooty-black Chrysler Sebring, hunched over a paper plate of cheese and crackers, while a member of his staff steered toward the next fund-raiser through the hills of suburban Atlanta. The back of the car was piled high with half a dozen Nike shoe boxes, a stuffed owl, and a reporter. Between bites, Ossoff stared ahead at the road, indulging in long pauses as he considered what to say about his new life as the luckiest young man in American politics. “There’s nothing that I would love more than a freewheeling conversation about political philosophy,” he said. “But I’m cautious because, as you know, the knives are out right now.”Well, this oughta be interesting.
That is not exactly how things appeared to most observers of this breakneck two-month campaign to fill the House seat vacated by Tom Price, the new secretary of Health and Human Services. Outside of the Sebring motorcade, Ossoff looks like the poster boy of the resistance, the grassroots opposition to both President Donald Trump and the wave of nationalism that installed him in office. He is a relative neophyte running 20 points ahead of a divided Republican field in a congressional district that hasn’t been blue since Jimmy Carter, also a Georgian, was president; an anonymous congressional aide turned documentary-film producer made into a national political figure mostly by love from readers of the Daily Kos; a pleasant, generic hipster-technocrat vessel into which an entire nation of angry Democrats has poured its electoral hopes (not to mention its millions of dollars — literally millions, a wild haul for a first-time nobody in a two-month race).
In this brave new post-2016 world, the Ossoff campaign is an experiment of sorts, a Trump-backlash trial balloon that might — on April 18, when the first round of voting is held, or on June 20, when the likely runoff will be completed — tell us just how much the president has reshaped the electoral map. It may also tell us that Democrats will have to do a whole lot more than just ride the wave of Trump hate to have a real chance of puncturing House Republicans’ red wall in 2018. Which is where Tom Perez, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, tends to come down. “Our mistakes, I think, were not just in 2016,” he told me, sketching out his vision for how the party might win back control of the federal government. “Our mistakes were a number of years in the making. We ignored too many voters. We got away from a 50-state strategy. And we took too many people for granted.” Now, Perez said, he’s focused on making up for lost time, which includes plans to channel resources into Georgia’s Sixth District. “We’re going to work hard down there,” he said, “because underdogs win.”
By March, anti-Trump enthusiasm and the national spotlight had made the Ossoff campaign look considerably less underdog-y; most recent polls put him at 40 percent, within striking distance of a majority (which would win him the seat outright and allow him to avoid a runoff in which a Republican candidate could consolidate conservative voters). The Atlanta suburbs seemed so upended by the race it almost didn’t feel like the South at all; traveling from Trump’s Washington, D.C., to what Ossoff hopes will soon become his Georgia seat is like walking out of the Gathering of Juggalos and into the Metropolitan Opera. “He’s our hope,” Carol Finkelstein, a 71-year-old from Sandy Springs, told me in her placid living room on a recent Saturday, just before Ossoff took to the carpet to address her neighbors. “He can’t stop a runaway train, but I’m hoping he can at least be a voice of reason.” Nearby, Barbara Brown, a 93-year-old who’s also committed to voting for Ossoff, was less diplomatic. “I’m an Independent,” she told me. “My husband was the Republican, but we don’t have to worry about him anymore.”
Stories about free agency, rubbing mud and a pitcher whose name was a lot cooler than yours https://t.co/wm9kz0CDf8— New York Times Books (@nytimesbooks) April 2, 2017
People who read the news are more likely to be Islamophobic, study finds https://t.co/OXUcOIP9eM
— The Independent (@Independent) April 3, 2017
