Former Prosecutor: Rice Unmasking Could Be ‘Major Political Abuse of Power’

National Review contributing editor Andrew McCarthy said that former White House official Susan Rice’s requests to unmask the names of President Donald Trump’s associates could constitute “a major political abuse of power,” during an interview Wednesday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

Rice, a former national security adviser under former President Barack Obama, came under fire this week after reports surfaced indicating she had requested the unmasking of officials connected with Trump’s presidential campaign and transition team. LifeZette Editor-in-Chief Laura Ingraham asked McCarthy if it is “ever permissible for somebody who is in a political position like Susan Rice was with her history to request the unmasking of people she knew were Trump transition people or political people of an opposing party,” and McCarthy replied that the request was worrisome, even if legal.

“And the question is, was this an isolated incident or two, or is it a pattern of behavior from which you could infer there was a political spying operation going on?”

“Well, it’s a major political abuse of power if that’s what she did,” McCarthy answered. “Technically, Laura, she does have the authority to request, but I think where people get confused here is we often talk about the intelligence community as if it were a big, undifferentiated hull.”

McCarthy, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, noted the intelligence community is composed of three separate organizations: the FBI, NSA, and CIA — all of which are tasked with collecting raw intelligence information and refining it into reports. Subsequently, these reports can be disseminated throughout the entire intelligence community.

“And that’s important because you heard what Rice said, that sometimes it’s necessary in order to understand the intelligence to unmask,” McCarthy said. “The people who know the most about the investigation are the collecting agencies that are doing it.”

Noting that Rice was merely a “consumer” — not a “collector” of data nor a “writer” of the intelligence reports — McCarthy said her previous status as a White House official under a president from a different party than Trump cast doubt upon the purpose for her unmasking requests.

“By the time a report gets to someone like Susan Rice … it’s already been assessed whether the identity of the American is necessary to understand the intelligence value,” McCarthy said. “The people who know that issue best — the FBI — already made that call based on … court-ordered minimization instructions.”

“Ask people who consume intelligence reports: Have you ever gone back to one of these agencies and asked them to unmask the identity of a U.S. person because you couldn’t understand the intelligence reporting without it?” McCarthy recommended. “And I bet you that to a person they’ll say they virtually never did that.”

Rice’s conduct “outside the protocols” raised questions concerning whether her unmasking request originated from her political interests “where there was no need to do the unmasking because that had already been vetted by the intelligence agencies that collected the information,” McCarthy said.

“And the question is, was this an isolated incident or two, or is it a pattern of behavior from which you could infer there was a political spying operation going on?” McCarthy said.

Rice represents one part of what McCarthy called a “three-part enterprise” including the unmasking of Trump officials, Obama’s issuance of an 11th-hour executive order allowing the NSA greater latitude in disseminating raw intelligence intercepts, and former Obama officials such as Evelyn Farkas, who left in 2015 only to join Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

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McCarthy noted that Farkas admitted during a recent MSNBC interview that she had encouraged the intelligence community and Congress to request as much disclosure as possible of sensitive materials while Obama was still in office. This, Farkas admitted, is “why you have the leaking.”

Sure enough, the Trump administration has suffered a barrage of leaked information since the president’s inauguration. Although the congressional Democrats have shown a keen interest in investigating potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia’s attempts to influence the election, there has been a marked lack of interest in either Rice’s revelations or the leaking and unmasking.

“If this is serious enough and there’s a pattern of it enough that somebody says, ‘You know, we have to actually investigate this in an aggressive way’ — which means throw everybody who had access to pieces of information before a grand jury and be ready to subpoena the journalist, too — that would be a very explosive, controversial investigation,” McCarthy said. “But it could be done.”