Behind the curtain
Official Washington is easily distracted these days by (1) the latest presidential tweet or (2) the newest bright, shiny object that hints at skulduggery.
Right now former national security adviser Susan Rice is that bright, shiny object.
Rice was outed this week as the Obama administration official who requested the “unmasking” of at least one member of the Trump transition caught up in legally-authorized intelligence community eavesdropping on foreign officials.
Now keeping in mind that Rice routinely received such reports six days a week during her tenure in the job, is there any there there? Was there a genuine national security reason to clarify who on the transition team was speaking (or was being spoken about by those foreign officials)? Or was Rice simply in search of good old-fashioned political gossip? And if the latter, did she share that information?
“I leaked nothing to nobody and never have and never will,” Rice said during an interview she chose to give to the ideologically compatible MSNBC. “There’s no equivalence between so-called unmasking and leaking.”
Of course, here Rice runs smack into her own reputation for duplicity and obfuscation. The American public will never forgive her for her assertions on five Sunday morning television news shows in 2012 that the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi was in response to an anti-Muslim video. Then there was her insistence that now convicted Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl “served with honor and distinction” at a time when her boss, the president, was trying to justify his trade of five Gitmo prisoners for Bergdahl’s release.
So, yes, it would be useful for the Senate Committee on Intelligence to put Rice under oath and have her explain her rationale for the unmasking and to get her denials of sharing that information on the record. Notice we suggest the Senate committee since sadly House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes — who helped unmask the unmasker — faces his own credibility problem.
It was Nunes, after all, who dashed to the White House to view the documents now the subject of so much interest, and then returned to the White House to “brief” the president on what he had “discovered” before going on camera to kick up some more dust on the issue last week.
All of which seems fairly trivial compared to Russian aggression around the world and dead babies in Syria.