Former national security adviser Susan Rice told MSNBC on Tuesday that allegations she “unmasked” associates of Donald Trump for political reasons while she served in the Obama administration were “absolutely false.”
Bloomberg and Fox on Monday reported that Rice had tried to unmask, or learn the identities of, officials on Trump’s transition team whose conversations with foreign agents – or conversations those agents were having about the transition officials – were incidentally collected during routine intelligence-gathering operations. The Daily Caller then reported that Rice had created a “spreadsheet” with the names she had unmasked.
“The allegation is that somehow Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes,” Rice told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “That’s absolutely false.
“There were times when I would ask the intelligence community to go through its process to give me more context” on reports summarizing conversations that the National Security Agency had picked up as it surveilled foreign agents on US soil, Rice said.
She did not offer details but confirmed that it was “possible” the Trump team had been picked up in the incidental surveillance.
Some have expressed concern over the fact that the names of Trump associates who had been caught up in the surveillance and later unmasked, such as former national security adviser Michael Flynn, had been leaked to the press. Bloomberg's Eli Lake, for instance, has argued that the "selective leaking of monitored communications of US persons is a police-state tactic."
But Rice told Mitchell that she "leaked nothing to nobody."
"I never have and never would," she said.
She added that there was "no equivalence" between unmasking and leaking.
"As national security adviser, I can't solicit intelligence reports," Rice said, adding: "If I saw an intelligence report that looked potentially significant - and, by definition, if it is being provided to me, it is significant - then I can make that request. That's necessary for me to do my job."
If the intelligence community "feels they can give me the answer, they will give me the answer," she added.
National-security experts say Rice's reported requests to identify who was speaking with the foreign officials before Trump was inaugurated were neither unusual nor against the law - especially if, as Lake reported, the foreign officials being monitored were discussing "valuable political information" that required the identity of the people they were speaking to, or about, to be uncovered.
"The identities of US persons may be released under two circumstances: 1) the identity is needed to make sense of the intercept; 2) if a crime is involved in the conversation," said Robert Deitz, a former senior counselor to the CIA director and former general counsel at the National Security Agency.
"Any senior official who receives the underlying intelligence may request these identities," Deitz said.
Steve Slick, a former CIA operations officer and NSC official who now heads the Intelligence Studies Project at the University of Texas at Austin, added that "by definition, any report that the NSA elects to disseminate is relevant to a foreign or national-security issue."
But it is "often not possible for a consumer or reader to fully understand the significance of a report without knowing precisely which US person may have been communicating with the foreign official," he added.
Documents showing that Rice made the requests were uncovered by the National Security Council's senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, according to Lake's report. Cohen-Watnick was involved in providing documents related to the incidental surveillance of members of Trump's transition team to House Intelligence Committee's chairman, Devin Nunes, about two weeks ago, though it is unclear whether they are the same documents mentioned in Lake's reporting.