“I know nothing about this”, Rice said.
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“There is a troubling direction that some of this is going in”, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Monday. “Or a political issue?”
Per Rogers: first, a “valid need to know”, and, second, an affirmative answer to the question: “Is the identification necessary to truly understand the intelligence value the report is created to generate?” “I think he’s been treated very, very unfairly by the media”. Rand Paul (R-KY), who had played golf with the President on Sunday, declared the story a “smoking gun”.
On “America’s Newsroom” today, Guy Benson acknowledged that the “unmasking” revelations don’t prove Trump’s wiretapping claim, but he said the media is downplaying the significance of the Rice reports.
“What if Dick Cheney had asked for the unmasking of names for Barack Obama’s incoming administration?”
Rice became a favorite target of conservatives after the 2012 attacks on a US compound in Benghazi, Libya, when she was sent out to do television interviews with talking points about the attacks that later proved to be wrong.
“I know nothing about this”.
Rice would be authorized to request the information if she could argue that she needed the names to understand the reports in context.
Rice has a checkered past when it comes to public statements. “It turns out the most effective thing that Russian Federation did was change public opinion through targeted social media”, using 1,000 trolls spreading “fake news” to Americans in key states, Colbert said.
In its closing days, the Obama Administration scrambled to preserve as much intelligence as it could about Russian Federation and possible collusion with the Trump campaign.
White House officials say some Obama holdovers are part of a so-called deep state out to tear Trump down. He noted there was nothing stopping the former administration from looking through Trump officials and national security advisers’ conversations during the transition window.
According to the New York Times, Cohen-Watnick was one of two officials who supplied Nunes with the intelligence reports.
Of the spying on Americans without a warrant, he said “it is inappropriate and it should be illegal”.
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Nunes is chairman of the House intelligence committee and was a member of Donald Trump’s transition team. But he added: “I do think that it’s interesting, the level, or lack thereof, of interest in this subject”.
