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.... moments ago Bloomberg's Eli Lake confirmed that it was indeed Susan Rice who was responsible for the repeatedly "unmasking" multiple members of the Trump team

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... Making matters worse, Rice appears to have lied: while she has not spoken directly on the issue of unmasking, last month when she was asked on the "PBS NewsHour" about reports that Trump transition officials, including Trump himself, were swept up in incidental intelligence collection, Rice said: "I know nothing about this," adding, "I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that account today."

Ironically, it's the same Susan Rice who two weeks ago tweeted the following:
When the White House twists the truth, we are all less safe. Why veracity matters to our security. https://t.co/eqkReeBIsG — Susan Rice (@AmbassadorRice) March 22, 2017

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Confirmed: Susan Rice "Unmasked" Trump Team

Once again it appears that Trump was right: the conspiracy theory that a close Obama associate worked to "unmask" the Trump team, resulting in the ongoing media spectacle over "collusion" between Trump and the Kremlin, has been confirmed, first by Mike Cernovich, and now by Bloomberg itself.

As noted last night, Journalist and author Mike Cernovich dropped an exclusive bombshell - naming Obama's National Security Advisor Susan Rice as the official responsible for the 'unmasking' of the incoming Trump team during 'incidental' surveillance. This was apparently discovered after the White House Counsel's office reviewed Rice's document log requests:

The reports Rice requested to see are kept under tightly-controlled conditions. Each person must log her name before being granted access to them. Upon learning of Rice’s actions, [National Security Advisor] H. R. McMaster dispatched his close aide Derek Harvey to Capitol Hill to brief Chairman Nunes.

Cernovich pointed out, as revealed in an article by Circa, that President Obama began loosening the rules regarding "incidental intercepts" starting in 2011 - making it easier for the US Government to spy on individuals who are not the primary target(s) of a surveillance operation.

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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

And guess who had authorization to unmask individuals who were 'incidentally' surveilled? Former CIA Director John Brennan, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Obama's National Security advisor Susan Rice.

Also of note is the claim that New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman has been sitting on the Susan Rice story for at least two days:

This reporter has been informed that 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.

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Fox News anchor Adam Housley tweeted on Friday that the surveillance that led to the unmasking began before Trump was the GOP nominee, and that the person who did the unmasking is a "very senior" and "very well known" person in the surveillance community - and not someone in the FBI. As ZeroPointNow noted, "this of course begs the question of whether or not President Obama would have ordered Rice to perform the unmasking."

* * *

Until this morning, the Cernovich report was unconfirmed, with many in the "legacy media" accusing Cernovich, who recently was profiled on 60 Minutes for being a prominent member of the "fake news" dissemination team for being - what else - fake news. However, moments ago Bloomberg's Eli Lake confirmed that it was indeed Susan Rice who was responsible for the repeatedly "unmasking" multiple members of the Trump team, in what may be dubbed yet another "conspiracy" to delegitimize the current US president.

From Eli Lake:
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."

As Lake adds, 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.

The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations -- primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.

Rice has not yet responded to a Bloomberg email seeking comment on Monday morning. Her role in requesting the identities of Trump transition officials adds an important element to the dueling investigations surrounding the Trump White House since the president's inauguration.

Making matters worse, Rice appears to have lied: while she has not spoken directly on the issue of unmasking, last month when she was asked on the "PBS NewsHour" about reports that Trump transition officials, including Trump himself, were swept up in incidental intelligence collection, Rice said: "I know nothing about this," adding, "I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that account today."

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Ironically, it's the same Susan Rice who two weeks ago tweeted the following:
Susan Rice: When the White House twists the truth, we are all less safe. Why veracity matters to our security. https://t.co/eqkReeBIsG
— Susan Rice (@AmbassadorRice) March 22, 2017

Lies aside, according to the Bloomberg reports, "Rice's multiple requests to learn the identities of Trump officials discussed in intelligence reports during the transition period does highlight a longstanding concern for civil liberties advocates about U.S. surveillance programs. The standard for senior officials to learn the names of U.S. persons incidentally collected is that it must have some foreign intelligence value, a standard that can apply to almost anything. This suggests Rice's unmasking requests were likely within the law."

Perhaps, but they also served a key political purpose: to create a media firestorm of controversy involving the Trump team, and to delegitimize Donald Trump as much as possible.

Furthermore, the news about Rice also may explain what Bloomberg dubs the "strange behavior of Nunes in the last two weeks."

It emerged last week that he traveled to the White House last month, the night before he made an explosive allegation about Trump transition officials caught up in incidental surveillance. At the time he said he needed to go to the White House because the reports were only on a database for the executive branch. It now appears that he needed to view computer systems within the National Security Council that would include the logs of Rice's requests to unmask U.S. persons.

The ranking Democrat on the committee Nunes chairs, Representative Adam Schiff, viewed these reports on Friday. In comments to the press over the weekend he declined to discuss the contents of these reports, but also said it was highly unusual for the reports to be shown only to Nunes and not himself and other members of the committee.

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In a tacit admission by Lake that Rice may have crossed numerous boundaries, the Bloomberg reporter adds

"much about this is highly unusual: if not how the surveillance was collected, then certainly how and why it was disseminated."

However the real question goes back to square one: did Obama order the unmasking, and if so, to what political purpose?

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Putin Derangement Syndrome Arrives

So Michael Flynn, who was Donald Trump's national security adviser before he got busted talking out of school to Russia's ambassador, has reportedly offered to testify in exchange for immunity.

For seemingly the 100th time, social media is exploding. This is it! The big reveal!

Perhaps it will come off just the way people are expecting. Perhaps Flynn will get a deal, walk into the House or the Senate surrounded by a phalanx of lawyers, and unspool the whole sordid conspiracy.

He will explain that Donald Trump, compromised by ancient deals with Russian mobsters, and perhaps even blackmailed by an unspeakable KGB sex tape, made a secret deal. He'll say Trump agreed to downplay the obvious benefits of an armed proxy war in Ukraine with nuclear-armed Russia in exchange for Vladimir Putin's help in stealing the emails of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and John Podesta.

I personally would be surprised if this turned out to be the narrative, mainly because we haven't seen any real evidence of it. But episodes like the Flynn story have even the most careful reporters paralyzed. What if, tomorrow, it all turns out to be true?

What if reality does turn out to be a massive connect-the-dots image of St. Basil's Cathedral sitting atop the White House? (This was suddenly legitimate British conspiracist Louise Mensch's construction in The New York Times last week.) What if all the Glenn Beck-style far-out charts with the circles and arrows somehow all make sense?

This is one of the tricks that keeps every good conspiracy theory going. Nobody wants to be the one claiming the emperor has no clothes the day His Highness walks out naked. And this Russia thing has spun out of control into just such an exercise of conspiratorial mass hysteria.

Even I think there should be a legitimate independent investigation – one that, given Trump's history, might uncover all sorts of things. But almost irrespective of what ends up being uncovered on the Trump side, the public prosecution of this affair has taken on a malevolent life of its own.

One way we recognize a mass hysteria movement is that everyone who doesn't believe is accused of being in on the plot. This has been going on virtually unrestrained in both political and media circles in recent weeks.

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The aforementioned Mensch, a noted loon who thinks Putin murdered Andrew Breitbart but has somehow been put front and center by The Times and HBO's Real Time, has denounced an extraordinary list of Kremlin plants. She's tabbed everyone from

Jeff Sessions ("a Russian partisan") to
Rudy Giuliani and
former Assistant FBI Director James Kallstrom ("agents of influence") to
Glenn Greenwald ("Russian shill") to
ProPublica and
Democracy Now! (also "Russian shills"), to the
15-year-old girl with whom Anthony Weiner sexted (really, she says, a Russian hacker group called "Crackas With Attitudes") to an
unnamed number of FBI agents in the New York field office ("moles").

And that's just for starters.

Others are doing the same. Eric Boehlert of Media Matters, upon seeing the strange behavior of Republican Intel Committee chair Devin Nunes, asked "what kind of dossier" the Kremlin has on Nunes.

Dem-friendly pollster Matt McDermott wondered why reporters Michael Tracey and Zaid Jilani aren't on board with the conspiracy stories (they might be "unwitting" agents!) and noted, without irony, that Russian bots mysteriously appear every time he tweets negatively about them.

Think about that last one. Does McDermott think Tracey and Jilani call their handlers at the sight of a scary Matt McDermott tweet and have the FSB send waves of Russian bots at him on command? Or does he think it's an automated process? What goes through the heads of such people?

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I've written a few articles on the Russia subject that have been very tame, basically arguing that it might be a good idea to wait for evidence of collusion before those of us in the media jump in the story with both feet. But even I've gotten the treatment.

I've been "outed" as a possible paid Putin plant by the infamous "PropOrNot" group, which is supposedly dedicated to rooting out Russian "agents of influence." You might remember PropOrNot as the illustrious research team the Washington Post once relied on for a report that accused 200 alternative websites of being "routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season."

Politicians are getting into the act, too. It was one thing when Rand Paul balked at OKing the expansion of NATO to Montenegro ...

... and John McCain didn't hesitate to say that "the senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin."

Even Bernie Sanders has himself been accused of being a Putin plant by Mensch. But even he's gotten on board of late, asking, "What do the Russians have on Mr. Trump?"

So even people who themselves have been accused of being Russian plants are now accusing people of being Russian plants. As the Russians would say, it's enough to make your bashka hurt.

Sanders should know better. Last week, during hearings in the Senate, multiple witnesses essentially pegged his electoral following as unwitting fellow travelers for Putin.

Former NSA chief Keith Alexander spoke openly of how Russia used the Sanders campaign to "drive a wedge within the Democratic Party," while Dr. Thomas Rid of Kings College in London spoke of Russia's use of "unwitting agents" and "overeager journalists" to drive narratives that destabilized American politics.

This testimony was brought out by Virginia Democrat Mark Warner. Warner has been in full-blown "precious bodily fluids" mode throughout this scandal. During an interview with The Times on the Russia subject a month back, there was a thud outside the window. "That may just be the FSB," he said. The paper was unsure if he was kidding.

Warner furthermore told The Times that in order to get prepared for his role as an exposer of 21st-century Russian perfidy, he was "losing himself in a book about the Romanovs," and had been quizzing staffers about "Tolstoy and Nabokov."

This is how nuts things are now: a senator brushes up on Nabokov and Tolstoy (Tolstoy!) to get pumped to expose Vladimir Putin.

Even the bizarre admission by FBI director (and sudden darling of the same Democrats who hated him months ago) James Comey that he didn't know anything about Russia's biggest company didn't seem to trouble Americans very much. Here's the key exchange, from a House hearing in which Jackie Speier quizzed Comey:

SPEIER: Now, do we know who Gazprom-Media is? Do you know anything about Gazprom, director?
COMEY: I don't.
SPEIER: Well, it's a – it's an oil company.

(Incidentally, Gazprom – primarily a natural-gas giant – is not really an oil company. So both Comey and Speier got it wrong.)

As Leonid Bershidsky of Bloomberg noted, this exchange was terrifying to Russians. The leader of an investigation into Russian espionage not knowing what Gazprom is would be like an FSB chief not having heard of Exxon-Mobil. It's bizarre, to say the least.

Testimony of the sort that came from Warner's committee last week is being buttressed by news stories in liberal outlets like Salon insisting that "Bernie Bros" were influenced by those same ubiquitous McDermott-chasing Russian "bots."

These stories insist that, among other things, these evil bots pushed on the unwitting "bros" juicy "fake news" stories about Hillary being "involved with various murders and money laundering schemes."

Some 13.2 million people voted for Sanders during the primary season last year. What percentage does any rational person really believe voted that way because of "fake news"?

I would guess the number is infinitesimal at best. The Sanders campaign was driven by a lot of factors, but mainly by long-developing discontent within the Democratic Party and enthusiasm for Sanders himself.

To describe Sanders followers as unwitting dupes who departed the true DNC faith because of evil Russian propaganda is both insulting and ridiculous. It's also a testimony to the remarkable capacity for self-deception within the leadership of the Democratic Party.

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If the party's leaders really believe that Russian intervention is anywhere in the top 100 list of reasons why some 155 million eligible voters (out of 231 million) chose not to pull a lever for Hillary Clinton last year, they're farther along down the Purity of Essence nut-hole than Mark Warner.

Moreover, even those who detest Trump with every fiber of their being must see the dangerous endgame implicit in this entire line of thinking. If the Democrats succeed in spreading the idea that straying from the DNC-approved candidate – in either the past or the future – is/was an act of "unwitting" cooperation with the evil Putin regime, then the entire idea of legitimate dissent is going to be in trouble.

Imagine it's four years from now (if indeed that's when we have our next election). A Democratic candidate stands before the stump, and announces that a consortium of intelligence experts has concluded that Putin is backing the hippie/anti-war/anti-corporate opposition candidate.

Or, even better: that same candidate reminds us "what happened last time" when people decided to vote their consciences during primary season. It will be argued, in seriousness, that true Americans will owe their votes to the non-Putin candidate. It would be a shock if some version of this didn't become an effective political trope going forward.

But if you're not worried about accusing non-believers of being spies, or pegging legitimate dissent as treason, there's a third problem that should scare everyone.

Last week saw Donna Brazile and Dick Cheney both declare Russia's apparent hack of DNC emails an "act of war." This coupling seemed at first like political end times: as Bill Murray would say, "dogs and cats, living together."

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But there's been remarkable unanimity among would-be enemies in the Republican and Democrat camps on this question. Suddenly everyone from Speier to McCain to Kamala Harris to Ben Cardin have decried Russia's alleged behavior during the election as real or metaphorical acts of war: a "political Pearl Harbor," as Cardin put it.

That no one seems to be concerned about igniting a hot war with nuclear-powered Russia at a time when both countries have troops within "hand-grenade range" of each in Syria other is bizarre, to say the least. People are in such a fever to drag Trump to impeachment that these other considerations seem not to matter.

This is what happens when people lose their heads.

There are a lot of people who will say that these issues are of secondary importance to the more important question of whether or not we have a compromised Russian agent in the White House.

But when it comes to Trump-Putin collusion, we're still waiting for the confirmation. As Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters put it, the proof is increasingly understood to be the thing we find later, as in, "If we do the investigations, we will find the connections."

But on the mass hysteria front, we already have evidence enough to fill a dozen books. And if it doesn't freak you out, it probably should.

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All old news to anyone who was taught how to "duck and cover" under their desk at school in the 50s and 60s.

Because fear-mongering worked so well the last time, sowing seeds of distrust that have lasted generations and allowed the power structure to continue with nary a ripple.

Let's do it again, let's get the people back under those flimsy desks. Then we can get back to business as usual. And they won't notice a thing.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:

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.... moments ago Bloomberg's Eli Lake confirmed that it was indeed Susan Rice who was responsible for the repeatedly "unmasking" multiple members of the Trump team

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before he was even the nominee ...

Quote:

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... Making matters worse, Rice appears to have lied: while she has not spoken directly on the issue of unmasking, last month when she was asked on the "PBS NewsHour" about reports that Trump transition officials, including Trump himself, were swept up in incidental intelligence collection, Rice said: "I know nothing about this," adding, "I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that account today."

Ironically, it's the same Susan Rice who two weeks ago tweeted the following:
When the White House twists the truth, we are all less safe. Why veracity matters to our security. https://t.co/eqkReeBIsG — Susan Rice (@AmbassadorRice) March 22, 2017

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=========
START OF ARTICLE

Quote:

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Confirmed: Susan Rice "Unmasked" Trump Team

Once again it appears that Trump was right: the conspiracy theory that a close Obama associate worked to "unmask" the Trump team, resulting in the ongoing media spectacle over "collusion" between Trump and the Kremlin, has been confirmed, first by Mike Cernovich, and now by Bloomberg itself.

As noted last night, Journalist and author Mike Cernovich dropped an exclusive bombshell - naming Obama's National Security Advisor Susan Rice as the official responsible for the 'unmasking' of the incoming Trump team during 'incidental' surveillance. This was apparently discovered after the White House Counsel's office reviewed Rice's document log requests:

The reports Rice requested to see are kept under tightly-controlled conditions. Each person must log her name before being granted access to them. Upon learning of Rice’s actions, [National Security Advisor] H. R. McMaster dispatched his close aide Derek Harvey to Capitol Hill to brief Chairman Nunes.

Cernovich pointed out, as revealed in an article by Circa, that President Obama began loosening the rules regarding "incidental intercepts" starting in 2011 - making it easier for the US Government to spy on individuals who are not the primary target(s) of a surveillance operation.

---

And also for the government to snoop on people they find "interesting" ... business leaders, judges, politicians, and media personalities.

Quote:

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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

And guess who had authorization to unmask individuals who were 'incidentally' surveilled? Former CIA Director John Brennan, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Obama's National Security advisor Susan Rice.

Also of note is the claim that New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman has been sitting on the Susan Rice story for at least two days:

This reporter has been informed that 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.

---

Or maybe give him a heads up so he can start destroying records?

Quote:

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Fox News anchor Adam Housley tweeted on Friday that the surveillance that led to the unmasking began before Trump was the GOP nominee, and that the person who did the unmasking is a "very senior" and "very well known" person in the surveillance community - and not someone in the FBI. As ZeroPointNow noted, "this of course begs the question of whether or not President Obama would have ordered Rice to perform the unmasking."

* * *

Until this morning, the Cernovich report was unconfirmed, with many in the "legacy media" accusing Cernovich, who recently was profiled on 60 Minutes for being a prominent member of the "fake news" dissemination team for being - what else - fake news. However, moments ago Bloomberg's Eli Lake confirmed that it was indeed Susan Rice who was responsible for the repeatedly "unmasking" multiple members of the Trump team, in what may be dubbed yet another "conspiracy" to delegitimize the current US president.

From Eli Lake:
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."

As Lake adds, 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.

The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations -- primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.

Rice has not yet responded to a Bloomberg email seeking comment on Monday morning. Her role in requesting the identities of Trump transition officials adds an important element to the dueling investigations surrounding the Trump White House since the president's inauguration.

Making matters worse, Rice appears to have lied: while she has not spoken directly on the issue of unmasking, last month when she was asked on the "PBS NewsHour" about reports that Trump transition officials, including Trump himself, were swept up in incidental intelligence collection, Rice said: "I know nothing about this," adding, "I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that account today."

---

I TOLD you they were paid to lie.

Quote:

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Ironically, it's the same Susan Rice who two weeks ago tweeted the following:
Susan Rice: When the White House twists the truth, we are all less safe. Why veracity matters to our security. https://t.co/eqkReeBIsG
— Susan Rice (@AmbassadorRice) March 22, 2017

Lies aside, according to the Bloomberg reports, "Rice's multiple requests to learn the identities of Trump officials discussed in intelligence reports during the transition period does highlight a longstanding concern for civil liberties advocates about U.S. surveillance programs. The standard for senior officials to learn the names of U.S. persons incidentally collected is that it must have some foreign intelligence value, a standard that can apply to almost anything. This suggests Rice's unmasking requests were likely within the law."

Perhaps, but they also served a key political purpose: to create a media firestorm of controversy involving the Trump team, and to delegitimize Donald Trump as much as possible.

Furthermore, the news about Rice also may explain what Bloomberg dubs the "strange behavior of Nunes in the last two weeks."

It emerged last week that he traveled to the White House last month, the night before he made an explosive allegation about Trump transition officials caught up in incidental surveillance. At the time he said he needed to go to the White House because the reports were only on a database for the executive branch. It now appears that he needed to view computer systems within the National Security Council that would include the logs of Rice's requests to unmask U.S. persons.

The ranking Democrat on the committee Nunes chairs, Representative Adam Schiff, viewed these reports on Friday. In comments to the press over the weekend he declined to discuss the contents of these reports, but also said it was highly unusual for the reports to be shown only to Nunes and not himself and other members of the committee.

---

The Democrats have been using these hearings as nothing more than an excuse to bloviate and grandstand.

Quote:

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In a tacit admission by Lake that Rice may have crossed numerous boundaries, the Bloomberg reporter adds

"much about this is highly unusual: if not how the surveillance was collected, then certainly how and why it was disseminated."

However the real question goes back to square one: did Obama order the unmasking, and if so, to what political purpose?

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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-03/confirmed-susan-rice-unmasked
-trump-team

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