Provided by USA Today: The investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election — and President Trump's counterattack against surveillance and leaking — has brought a new term into the American political lexicon.
"Unmasking."
Until now, the process for revealing information about U.S. citizens in intelligence reports was almost completely obscure outside of the intelligence community.
But the issue has taken on new importance since House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes alleged that the Obama administration may have improperly identified Trump transition officials in classified reports he had access to — reports that later turned out to be provided to him by the Trump White House.
Here's what we know about the hows and whys of unmasking:
"Biden is an avatar for a third Obama term.” “In a sense, Obama never left. He was the first president in a century to stay in Washington after the end of his term,”
“In political circles, it was no secret that Obama had thrown his support behind Kamala Harris. She’s ambitious and appealing and, without any strong ideas or opinions of her own, poses no threat to him. She was Obama’s ideal heir, but primary voters found her fake and unlikeable, and she was out of the race in early December. He’d find a way to restore her, but, in the meantime, needed a horse to ride through the primaries.”
Susan E. Rice reportedly sought to unmask the identities of Americans connected with President Trump's campaign and transition who were mentioned in foreign surveillance intelligence reports. And with that news, which was first reported Sunday by conservative social-media agitator Mike Cernovich and confirmed Monday by Bloomberg's Eli Lake, Washington spawned a huge game of Choose Your Own Adventure.
Conservatives — even some who have been skeptical of Trump's claim that the Obama administration surveilled him — saw it as highly suspicious. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called it a “smoking gun,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) labeled Rice “Typhoid Mary,” and the Wall Street Journal's editorial board issued a blistering op-ed on Tuesday morning:
All this is highly unusual — and troubling. Unmasking does occur, but it is typically done by intelligence or law-enforcement officials engaged in anti-terror or espionage investigations. Ms. Rice would have had no obvious need to unmask Trump campaign officials other than political curiosity.
The New York Times, meanwhile, is out with an analysis piece that pretty much takes the polar opposite view — that it's much ado about nothing, even a deliberate distraction from the White House:
Former national security officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, described the requests as normal and said they were justified by the need for the president’s top security adviser to understand the context of reports sent to her by the nation’s intelligence agencies.
Here's what we can say about the Rice situation at this point.
There is precisely zero evidence that Rice used this information — assuming the reports are true — for anything other than her own official purposes or did anything unholy.
But at the same time, Rice's own comments about this matter do lead to some legitimate questions. During an appearance on PBS's “NewsHour” two weeks ago, Rice was asked about the announcement by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) that Trump and his associates had been swept up in incidental surveillance that wasn't aimed at them.
Here was Rice's response: “I know nothing about this. I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that count today.”
If Rice had indeed unmasked Trump associates' identities in these foreign surveillance reports, that response wouldn't quite make sense.
Rice, of course, is no stranger to making public comments that later prove to be a liability. More than Hillary Clinton's remarks, it was Rice's post-Benghazi comments that gave the Obama administration major headaches, given that Rice said the attack appeared to result from spontaneous protests due to an anti-Islam video.
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