Perhaps a legal person can comment here, but I’m not sure if monitoring for collusion between Trump and the Russians automatically qualifies as a reason for unmasking the names.
As I understand it, suspicion of crimes by American citizens does not qualify, and it’s unclear how that applies to colluding with foreign powers. I’m wondering if it would depend on whether they’re trying to better understand the actions of the Russians or trying to better understand the actions of the Trump people. A fine line, admittedly.
Granted, this irrational, dishonest tactic is smart from a persuasion play point of view. (see Scott Adams). Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty, and go to great lengths to make people think investigation of espionage = spying. It works on the uninformed, which is most people, including some posters in this thread.
To state the obvious, Russian tampering in a presidential election is a violation of US national security. Part of the job of the National Security Adviser is to find out what’s going on with the tampering, who’s involved, and tell the President.
Well, these deflections usually indicate that something else is about to drop.
Remember that Erik Prince is Betsy Devos’ brother, by coincidence. And that Betsy Devos’ husband owns Spectrum Health, which happened to be, by coincidence, the other group linked up in the server connection between Trump Tower and Russian banks.
As I stated. I’m sure these are all, every single one, incredible coincidences. I mean, Trump must be the unluckiest person alive that these coincidences keep piling up, right?
Best part of this story is the unfettered honesty in this quote:
“I wouldn’t be surprised at all,” said Barry Faure, the Seychelles secretary of state for foreign affairs. “The Seychelles is the kind of place where you can have a good time away from the eyes of the media. That’s even printed in our tourism marketing. But I guess this time you smelled something.”
Indeed. “Conspiracy theorists” are mocked because they take a tiny amount of circumstantial evidence and use it to deny a theory that has mountains of evidence.
Here, there’s a lot of evidence–so far, mostly or entirely circumstantial–that folks in Trump’s campaign were coordinating with Russian operatives. Are folks using this mound of evidence to overturn any evidence to the contrary?
Note: these are not “anonymous sources”. Rice was lying about not knowing anything about this just 12 days ago in an interview.
“What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.
“The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.”
…
Michael Doran, former NSC senior director, told TheDCNF Monday that “somebody blew a hole in the wall between national security secrets and partisan politics.” This “was a stream of information that was supposed to be hermetically sealed from politics and the Obama administration found a way to blow a hole in that wall.”
How do those people, who have been out of government for a decade to decades, know what Susan Rice ordered? It seems like you’re suggesting they are credible because they are not anonymous sources. Is Mark Levine credible because he is not an anonymous source?
Yes, we can take these sources as facts, and Rice as a liar, since obviously any time someone says something that conflicts with a liberal, it must be the liberal who is lying.