When former national security adviser Susan Rice on Tuesday claimed, “I leaked nothing to nobody,” she conjured at least two misdirections to throw investigators off the scent of actions she may have taken improperly to “unmask” Americans surveilled by federal intelligence agencies.
The first misdirection was in her grammar and syntax. If you say you’ve done nothing to nobody you are, strictly, admitting the very thing you ostensibly deny. A single negative — I did nothing to anybody — is a real denial. A double negative negates the denial.
But let’s give Rice the benefit of the doubt and assume her nothing-to-nobody solecism was merely the sort error no one corrects at Washington Cathedral School, or Stanford and Oxford Universities, all of which she attended. So she was poorly educated; that’s not a crime.
But what about her mention of leaking? Denying that she leaked the identities of Americans is not the same as denying she shared those identities with others. Who said anything about leaking? As national security adviser she was not necessarily leaking if or when she disclosed identities to other officials.
The question is not about legality but about propriety, as is being widely pointed out. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes made it plain two weeks ago that incidental surveillance and unmasking were not necessarily illegal, but were nevertheless troubling. Indeed they are.
So whom did Rice share the information with, and why? What were the national security concerns at issue? The surveillance had nothing to do with Russia, apparently, so what was it about? There are still plenty of questions that need to be answered. Perhaps Congress could start to ask them soon.
