Under U.S. law, U.S. persons are protected from such disclosure, which could be dry cleaners asking envoys to pick up their laundry or wrong number phone messages spilling their guts about their mothers-in-law. If such U.S. persons get swept up in surveillance, they are protected. But only if they remain "masked," which is the law of the land.
Cernovich says the White House counsel's office has confirmed that Rice was one of the few officials with the authority to make the requests to unmask the innocent Americans caught up in surveillance dragnets. There was no national security reason to do so, but she did.
It makes a lot of sense if the aim is political, and White House spokesman Sean Spicer has pointed out that their goal was "to leak stuff." Based on White House logs, she did, during the transition, back when angry miserable Obama White House officials frowned in a group photo for the cameras.
The White House counsel's office disclosed these logs to House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, who has been as responsible a steward of America's secrets as anyone (and said nothing).
But it would mean that Rice has to have been responsible for the illegal leaking to the press of the legitimate activities of people like her NSC successor, Mike Flynn, for political rather than national security purposes. This would be true whether she did it herself or dispatched a flunky like fellow NSC official Ben Rhodes or Joe Biden's NSC man Colin Kahl to execute the dirty-tricks skullduggery.
It's par for the course. Rice was the speaker of the infamous phony White House talking points on why four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were slaughtered in Benghazi on 9/11/12, repeatedly stating for the press that the attack on the U.S. compound was the act of a spontaneous crowd that got out of control over a video and not the pre-planned, lethally executed al-Qaeda terrorist attack it was.
Cernovich reports that New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman (caught on WikiLeaks being in the tank with Obama) had the information and chose to sit on it to protect the former president.
But based on the White House counsel act, the news nevertheless got out. The story meshes well with what FBI director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committee in response to Nunes's request for information on leaks last March 20.
Comey told the committee that only 20 people would have had access to the names of innocent Americans caught up in the spy dragnet during the transition. Rice was one of them.
Rice, like Rhodes, has the farthest of far-left backgrounds and the highest of malice against the incoming president. Rhodes never was able to pass a background check to obtain a security clearance and continues to mock and berate Trump & Co., as if he thinks he owned the job and now they took it.
Another coeval at NSC, Colin Kahl, who was attached to Joe Biden, seems to have laid out the diabolical plans for picking off Trump's lieutenants one by one. The tweets he issues are unbelievable.
With a pattern of malice and mishandled security information centered on NSC dead-enders, the one thing we can see is that there is a coterie of illegal leakers who will compromise national security to enact their political aims. Devin Nunes pointedly asked Comey whether he knew that illegally leaking national security secrets is a jail-time offense. The FBI director said yes.
It's time to start investigating this arrogant abuse of power. Comey has not stated whether he is investigating these people or not, and this is proper. But with these dead-enders clearly threatening the Trump presidency, it's time to see a hard hand come out against these deep-staters who don't know when to leave office and who subscribe to the leftist situational ethics of "by any means necessary." They are poison for our republic, and if they are not removed, they will destroy the Trump presidency.
Susan Rice, who served as the National Security Adviser under President Obama, has been identified as the official who requested unmasking of incoming Trump officials, Cernovich Media can exclusively report.
The White House Counsel’s office identified Rice as the person responsible for the unmasking after examining Rice’s document log requests. The reports Rice requested to see are kept under tightly-controlled conditions. Each person must log his or her name before being granted access to them. Upon learning of Rice’s actions, Trump’s NSA H. R. McMaster dispatched his close aide Derek Harvey to Capitol Hill to brief Chairman Nunes.
“Unmasking” is the process of identifying individuals whose communications were caught in the dragnet of intelligence gathering. While conducting investigations into terrorism and other related crimes, intelligence analysts incidentally capture conversations about parties not subject to the search warrant. The identities of individuals who are not under investigation are kept confidential, for legal and moral reasons.
Under President Obama, the unmasking rules were changed. Circa originally reported:
As his presidency drew to a close, Barack Obama’s top aides routinely reviewed intelligence reports gleaned from the National Security Agency’s incidental intercepts of Americans abroad, taking advantage of rules their boss relaxed starting in 2011 to help the government better fight terrorism, espionage by foreign enemies and hacking threats, Circa has learned.
Three people close to President Obama, including his “fall guy” for Benghazi (Susan Rice), had authorization to unmask. Among those cleared to request and consume unmasked NSA-based intelligence reports about U.S. citizens were Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice, his CIA Director John Brennan and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Not even mainstream outlets denied that some Trump officials had been spied on, with the NY Times reporting:
WASHINGTON — A pair of White House officials helped provide Representative Devin Nunes of California, a Republican and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, with the intelligence reports that showed that President Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies.
According to WaPo, there were three sources for the reports, with Michael Ellis ultimately being blamed by WaPo and AP. What’s striking about the Times story is the spin it took. Trump had previously claimed he had been “wire tapped” (quotation marks in his original Tweet), leading to media screams that he prove it. The Times’ own reporting proves that President Trump and his associates were spied on.
The Times, rather than admit Trump had been vindicated, instead focused its attention on the question of who leaked the reports to Nunes:
Since disclosing the existence of the intelligence reports, Mr. Nunes has refused to identify his sources, saying he needed to protect them so others would feel safe going to the committee with sensitive information. In his public comments, he has described his sources as whistle-blowers trying to expose wrongdoing at great risk to themselves.
Since when did journalists attempt to unmask sources? The Times, WaPo, and other outlets rely on anonymous sources in nearly every article about national security. It’s clear they have an agenda — that agenda is not telling the truth.
This reporter has been informed that New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman has had this story about Susan Rice for at least 48 hours, and has chosen to sit on it in an effort to protect the reputation of former President Barack Obama.
(Mike Cernovich is a journalist, lawyer, author, and filmmaker. Cernovich Media is not owned by large corporate donors or robber barons. The NY Times’ largest shareholder (whose very word can crash the stock, crippling 401K and other retirement plans) is Carlos Slim. WaPo is owned by Jeff Bezos, who has a $600 million contract with deep state. WaPo has also been caught in a pay-for-play scandal.)
In light of the recent flurry of leaks by the so-called "deep state", which includes such agencies as the NSA and FBI and which last week lead to the resignation of Mike Flynn after a phone recording of his phone conversation with the Russian ambassador was leaked to the pro-left Washington Post and other anti-Trump publications, an article published on January 12 by the NYT has generated renewed interest.
One month ago, the NYT reported that "In its final days, the Obama administration expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections."
The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches.
The change means that far more officials will be searching through raw data. Essentially, the government is reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.
While previously the N.S.A. filtered information before sharing intercepted communications with another agency, like the C.I.A. or the intelligence branches of the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration, and furthermore N.S.A.’s analysts passed on only information they deemed pertinent, screening out the identities of innocent people and irrelevant personal information, following passage of Obama's 11th hour rule, "other intelligence agencies will be able to search directly through raw repositories of communications intercepted by the N.S.A. and then apply such rules for “minimizing” privacy intrusions."
In other words, what until recently was a trickle of private data captured about US individuals by the NSA with only a handful of people having full, immersive access, suddenly became a firehose with thousands of potential witnesses across 16 other agencies, each of whom suddenly became a potential source of leaks about ideological political opponents.
And with the universe of potential "leaking" culprits suddenly exploding exponentially, good luck finding the responsible party. However, the implications are far more serious than just loss of privacy rights.
This is his explanation: There was a sea-change here at the NSA with an order that came from president Obama 17 days before he left office where he allowed the NSA who used to control the data, it now goes to 16 other agencies and that just festered this whole leaking situation, and that happened on the way out, as the president was leaving the office.
Why did the Obama administration wait until it had 17 days left in their administration to put this order in place if they thought it was so important. They had 8 years, they didn't do it, number one.
Number two, it changed the exiting rule which was an executive order dating back to Ronald Reagan, that has been in place until 17 days before the Obama administration was going to end, that said the NSA gets the raw data, and they determine dissemination.
Instead, this change that the president put in place, signed off by the way by James Clapper on December 15, 2016, signed off by Loretta Lynch the Attorney General January 3, 2017, they decide that now 16 agencies can get the raw data and what that does is almost creates a shadow government. You have all these people who are not agreeing with President Trump's position, so it just festers more leaks.
If they had a justification for this, wonderful, why didn't they do it 8 years ago, 4 years ago, 3 years ago. Yet they wait until 17 days left. One potential answer: they knew they had a "smoking gun", and were working to make it easier to enable the information to be "leaked" despite the clearly criminal consequences of such dissemination.
As this point Hannity correctly points out, "it makes it that much more difficult by spreading out the information among 16 other agencies, if they want to target or take away the privacy rights, and illegally tap the phones, in this case General Flynn, it's going to be much harder to find the perpetrator."
Sekulow confirms, noting that back when only the NSA had access to this kind of raw data, there would be a very small amount of people who have access to this kind of data. "But this change in the Obama Administration was so significant that they allowed dissemination to 16 other agencies, and we wonder why there's leaks." The lawyer's conclusion: "President Obama, James Clapper, Loretta Lynch should be held accountable for this."
