I cut and pasted quite a bit, because 99.9 % of readers on this forum do not ever check links and this might be for even one person..

I post it ONLY because I am so sick of Fox News and the White House contriving everything under the sun to portray GOOG GOVERNMENT as something nefarious. The fact our President is conducting this, allowing it and quoting it is disturbing.

This article is very clear, and was recommended by someone who should know his stuff.

If you tire of wanting to know what is real, just skip it. I am beyond thinking most in here are even interested in what is real




"Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice reportedly tried to learn the identities of officials on President Donald Trump's transition team whose conversations with foreign officials were incidentally collected during routine intelligence-gathering operations.

The intelligence reports obtained by Rice, who served under President Barack Obama from 2013 to 2017, "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," Bloomberg's Eli Lake reported on Monday.

National-security experts say Rice's reported requests to identify who was speaking with the foreign officials before Trump was inaugurated were neither unusual nor against the law — especially if, as Lake reported, the foreign officials being monitored were discussing "valuable political information" that required the identity of the people they were speaking to, or about, to be uncovered.

"The identities of US persons may be released under two circumstances: 1) the identity is needed to make sense of the intercept; 2) if a crime is involved in the conversation," said Robert Deitz, a former senior counselor to the CIA director and former general counsel at the National Security Agency.

"Any senior official who receives the underlying intelligence may request these identities," Deitz said, noting that while "the bar for obtaining the identity is not particularly high, it must come from a senior official, and the reason cannot simply be raw curiosity."

Documents showing that Rice made those requests were uncovered by the National Security Council's senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, according to Lake's reporting. Cohen-Watnick was involved in providing documents related to the incidental surveillance of members of Trump's transition team to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes about two weeks ago, though it is unclear if they are the same documents mentioned in Lake's reporting.

A source of concern to some, however, has been why some of Trump's associates who had been caught up in the surveillance and later unmasked, such as former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, had their names leaked to the press. Lake, for instance, has argued that the "selective leaking of monitored communications of US persons is a police-state tactic."

But former NSA Director Michael Hayden, who also served as the principal deputy director of national intelligence and the director of the CIA, cautioned against "automatically assuming that the US person was party to the conversation" that may have prompted an unmasking.

"My life experience suggests that the overwhelming proportion of these cases of incidental collection is not information to or from an American, but information about an American," Hayden said. "In this case, it is very likely in most instances two foreigners talking about the Trump transition."

Lake's article follows a Fox News report citing "a source" who said the official who sought to identify the people who were speaking with monitored foreign agents was "very well known, very high up, very senior in the intelligence world."

Trump on Monday praised Fox's "amazing reporting on unmasking and the crooked scheme against us," which he said showed that "there was electronic surveillance" of his inner circle during the transition.


As Nunes has told reporters and as Lake has reported, there is no evidence that Trump and his team were directly surveilled.

The move by Rice, if she had probable cause, could likely be viewed as routine and expected of high-level intelligence officials, said Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the CIA and former executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for intelligence.


Pillar, who is now a nonresident senior fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security Studies, said Rice may have even been motivated to request identities in order to constrain her own communications.

"If Ms. Rice was communicating with members of Trump's team regarding transition matters and she learns from intelligence that some such members also are communicating with the Russians, she would want to know exactly who is doing that so she can be extra careful in her own talks, lest something she says gets relayed to Moscow," Pillar said.

"This whole story strikes me as just more of the effort to divert attention from the issue of the relations that Trump and his associates have had with Russia, and as part of the diversion to try to suggest impropriety of some sort on the part of the Obama administration," Pillar said. "In other words, it's a continuation of an effort to salvage something from Trump's baseless charges about Obama wiretapping him."

The White House has tried repeatedly, with varying degrees of evidence, to validate Trump's explosive claim made last month that Obama wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower during the election.

A former Obama administration official responsible for the Defense Department's Russia policy, for instance, came into the White House's crosshairs last week for what it has characterized as her admission that Obama-era officials were collecting intelligence on Trump and his transition team.

Pillar said that "an important thing to remember is that we are dealing with foreign intelligence — intelligence on Russian activities — and indeed, Russian activities that strike close to the heart of our democratic processes.

"We should be disturbed if whoever was in office was not keeping close tabs on that sort of thing," he said."

Susan Rice tried to 'unmask' Trump associates, report says - Business Insider




By the way, as I said, I don't care if anyone reads this..I know most don't care much about truth and USA but if there is someone, I excluded a few paras, so read the link to see the whole thing.

Nothing here trying to condemn Trump, his staff or anyone. I am just sick of him and Fox muddying up an important investigation. I hope he did nothing, because that would be a disaster for our country and bottom line is that..the country