Reports: Obama aide used intel to spy on Trump advisers

WASHINGTON (AP) — Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s national security adviser, denied reports that she or other Obama officials used secret intelligence to spy on Trump associates for political purposes.

Several media outlets have reported that the Obama administration improperly surveilled the Republican during and after the November election.

Presidential spokesman Sean Spicer cast Rice’s handling of intelligence in the waning days of Obama’s term as suspicious.

“The more we find out about this, the more we learn there was something there,” Spicer said.

According to a U.S. official, Rice asked spy agencies to give her the names of Trump associates who surfaced in intelligence reports she was regularly briefed on. Rice’s official role would have given her the ability to make those requests for national security purposes.

Rice, in an interview with MSNBC, admitted that she asked for the names of Americans referenced in reports. She refused to say whether she saw intelligence related to Trump associates or whether she asked for their identities.

The White House has been particularly incensed that intercepted conversations between national security adviser Michael Flynn and Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. were illegally leaked before the inauguration.

Rice denied that she had leaked details about Flynn’s call, saying, “I leaked nothing to nobody.”

The U.S. official said Rice’s Trump-related requests were discovered as part of a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on “unmasking” — the intelligence community’s term for revealing Americans’ identities that are supposed to stay hidden in classified reports. The review was prompted by a belief that there were inefficiencies in the current procedures and concerns over a policy change made in the closing days of the Obama administration, according to the official, who insisted on anonymity in order to disclose the sensitive information.

Rice has been accused of peddling falsehoods before. After the 2012 attacks on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, she was sent out to do television interviews with talking points that were false.