But, hey, remember, this wasn’t political
(Bloomberg)  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.
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.
For all the caterwauling from Democrats about Russia Russia Russia, they have no actual evidence. Even after trying these shenanigans, they still have no evidence. Here’s what they do potentially have
(Powerline)Â In any event, if Rice and others conspired to leak confidential information or publicly disclose information about individuals like General Flynn, it would be a crime.
That crime would be a felony. A big one. And, as many are thinking, would Rice do this without orders? Orders from Obama? There’s almost zero chance that Obama would put anything in writing or in any manner he could be implicated. Give the man credit, he’s slick, and unaccountable.
An interesting part to this whole thing is that it was Mike Cernovich, a guy called Fake News by 60 Minutes, who scooped everyone on this.
This is also funny
[I]t’s safe to say that there was absolutely no collusion of any kind between Team Trump and anyone Russian. None. How do I know this to a near certainty? Because we haven’t seen anybody leak any evidence of any in the six-plus months that they’ve been pushing this nonsense.
And they most certainly won’t find anything in the future. But, hey, it’s a great way to drive a wedge between Americans, fundraise, and be their typical apoplectic selves.
