Here's Part 1 from earlier.
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."
That was from Eli Lake at Bloomberg. Now the media, once it gets around to having to actually cover it (for now it's Washington Post/Slate mumbling about "right wing nutjobs") will be arguing that Rice's actions were legitimate. So here's an intriguing Part 2. from Sarah Carter at Circa It's not surprising, but if it holds up, it gets us closer to motive.
Computer logs that former President Obama’s team left behind in the White House indicate his national security adviser Susan Rice accessed numerous intelligence reports during Obama's last seven months in office that contained National Security Agency intercepts involving Donald Trump and his associates, Circa has learned.
Intelligence sources said the logs discovered by National Security Council staff suggested Rice’s interest in the NSA materials, some of which included unmasked Americans' identities, appeared to begin last July around the time Trump secured the GOP nomination and accelerated after Trump’s election in November launched a transition that continued through January.
We already knew this in part because of the timing of the FISA requests as I wrote earlier this month.
Trump had locked down the GOP nomination in May. Next month there was a FISA request targeting him. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court denied the request, and it is still unknown whether the request targeted Trump, or only his associates, but it’s silly to pretend that the submission of such a request a month after he became the presumptive GOP nominee was apolitical.
The second, narrower, FISA request came through in October. This one was approved. The reason for getting a FISA request in October was even more obvious than June. October is the crucial month in presidential elections. It’s the month of the “October Surprise” when the worst hit pieces based on the keenest opposition research is unleashed.
So this was about as apolitical as Watergate. The media will claim that Rice's actions were legitimate. But the next step will be finding how the material was leaked.
Remember the left is good at working within the system. Like Hillary Clinton, they set up chains of plausible deniability so that no laws were technically broken in each individual act. The real criminal culpability will come when the dots are connected together, when we know just who received the information and how it was used.