She didn’t “leak,” she only “unmasked.” This is former National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s self-defense for having sought the explicit exposure, in highly classified intelligence documents, of the names of US citizens inadvertently caught up in American surveillance of Russian officials.
Moreover, she and her partisans insist, seeking and achieving this “unmasking” (from either the director of the National Security Agency or the FBI) was entirely within her legal right as national-security adviser.
I’ll take her word for it, though if it had been so pristine, it’s unclear why Rice had previously lied and claimed no knowledge of any of it.
According to Eli Lake of Bloomberg, Rice “requested the identities of US persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign.” Dozens of occasions.
By way of explanation, Rice told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that unmasking is a tool to help consumers of intelligence — which is what she was as national-security adviser — to understand the context of overheard discussions.
It’s important to note that Rice wasn’t an intelligence official or analyst. She was a foreign-policy aide. She had no need of operational intelligence in these cases.
For example, why would she have needed to know that, in the only specific unmasking case we know of, the “US Person” in the transcripts was her former Obama administration colleague Michael J. Flynn?
Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador caused a flurry of controversy and led to his dismissal after three weeks, nominally because he lied about it to the vice president. Those contacts only became known because he was unmasked.
Rice disavowed all responsibility for that. “I leaked nothing to nobody” — and quite angrily, too. How could anyone even imagine she’d do such a thing!
The obvious question to ask when it comes to the unmaskings is whether they were secured, by Rice or others, at least in part to make it possible for someone else to leak names and information at some point. Her deputy Ben Rhodes bragged about his ability to control the Washington conversation when it came to the Iran nuclear deal, for example.
Because we know that did happen. We know someone leaked the unmasked information. We know the first leak was to The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, who reported Jan. 12 that Flynn had been on the phone five times with the Russian ambassador at the end of December.
From the news stories written over the past three months, we can be pretty sure that certain someone was in the White House. Indeed, we were told as much by The New York Times on March 1, which reported that “as Inauguration Day approached, Obama White House officials grew convinced that the intelligence was damning and that they needed to ensure that as many people as possible inside government could see it, even if people without security clearances could not.”
The article described an explicit Obama White House “push to preserve the intelligence.” Susan Rice ran the largest branch of the Obama White House, with 400 employees. It’s logical, given how many of them would have had the highest-level security clearances, that the leaker of the Flynn information came from the NSC ranks.
It’s also worth noting the conditions surrounding the Ignatius leak and others: It was a moment in which entirely justifiable concerns about Russian meddling in the 2016 election were dovetailing with a generally apocalyptic sense that US democracy was under existential threat from the incoming Trump presidency.
It is at precisely such moments of high melodrama that committing a crime like leaking the name of an American caught in telephone surveillance of a foreign national might seem like the truly moral thing to do, given the horror of an untrammeled and undiminished President Trump bestriding the narrow world like a Colossus.
Indeed, whoever told the Times about Team Obama’s efforts to spread what were called “breadcrumbs” of intelligence throughout the executive branch wasn’t doing so to blow the whistle on these activities. They did it because he or she or they were and are proud of their ingenuity and couldn’t help bragging about it a little.
None of this is to say the subject of Russian meddling isn’t the paramount concern. It is. But examining and getting the real story on the discomfiting behavior of the Obama White House in its final months is being all too flippantly dismissed by people who would be screaming bloody murder if Susan Rice were, say, Scooter Libby.