Susan Rice ordered unmasking of Trump team in intel, Bloomberg View reports

By Kelly Riddell - The Washington Times - Monday, April 3, 2017

Susan Rice, who Newsweek once described as former President Barack Obama’s “right-hand woman,” was at the center of unmasking Trump administration officials, a new report concludes.

Eli Lake, who broke the story for Bloomberg View, wrote on Monday morning: “White House lawyers last month discovered 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.