Former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice on Tuesday denied abusing intelligence for political reasons during her time in the White House, after a report revealed that she requested the identities of Trump transition team members in intelligence documents on numerous occasions.
“The allegation is that somehow, Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes,” Rice said on MSNBC. “That is absolutely false.”
The identities of U.S. persons in intelligence reports are normally “masked,” or redacted, but can be unmasked under certain circumstances. That includes instances when doing so is necessary to put the the intelligence into context.
Rice said that she and other officials unmasked the names of U.S. persons, but she denied doing so “for any political purposes.”
“Over eight years, for me and others who served, it was not uncommon, in fact it was necessary at times to make those requests to find out the identity of U.S. officials, on every topic under the sun when it seemed relevant,” she said.
She did not recall a spike in the frequency of requests for unmasking after Trump’s election victory.
“I don’t have a particular recollection of doing that more frequently after the election, for example, than doing so before,” she said.
According to Bloomberg, the intelligence documents in question featured communications between two foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, as well as communications that directly involved a Trump transition member and a foreign official. Both are forms of “incidental collection,” involving communications about or involving a U.S. person that are picked up during legal surveillance of a foreign target.
“I have no idea what reports allegedly are being described by those who are putting out this story,” Rice said. “I don’t know what time frame they were from, I don’t know the subject matter, and I don’t know who they think was collected upon.”
Rice also denied playing a role in leaks. Her successor, Mike Flynn, resigned in February after media reports revealed that he misled the vice-president about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador. Republican lawmakers seized on those leaks in ensuing months.
“The notion, which some people are trying to suggest, that by asking for the identity of the American person is the same is leaking it — is completely false,” Rice said.
“I leaked nothing to nobody, and never have and never would,” she said. “There’s no equivalence between so-called unmasking and leaking.”
Rice said it was “possible” that information about Trump associates was picked up incidentally during surveillance of a foreign target.
Reports of Rice’s involvement came on the heels of allegations from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes that details about Trump transition members, collected incidentally, were included in intelligence reports despite their having “little or no apparent foreign intelligence value.”
The chairman stressed that the surveillance had nothing to do with Russia.
Nunes also said additional Trump transition members were unmasked. The top-ranking Democrat on the committee, Adam Schiff, later said that, per Nunes, most of the names in the intercepts remained masked, but that the chairman said he could still piece together the identities of those involved.
Rice had previously denied knowing about Nunes’s allegations.
“I know nothing about this,” she told PBS NewsHour in March. “I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that account today.”
The House Intelligence Committee requested documents from the NSA, FBI, and CIA on March 15 related to unmasking procedures as well as instances thereof.
