Just one day after John Podesta appeared before a closed session of the House Intelligence Committee to offer his thoughts on “Russian meddling”, CNN’s anonymous sources are apparently telling them that Obama’s former National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, will also appear before a closed session of the committee next month. Here is more from CNN:
The House intelligence committee plans to interview Susan Rice next month as part of its investigation into Russia meddling in the US election last year, a high-profile target for Republicans who accuse President Barack Obama’s former national security adviser of improperly handling classified intelligence reports, according to sources familiar with the private talks.
Rice has vehemently denied doing anything wrong. But she has yet to answer questions from lawmakers, including declining a request to appear before a Senate judiciary subcommittee in May. And now, she has agreed to appear in a closed-door session that is expected to take place before the House departs for its August recess.
“Ambassador Rice is cooperating with bipartisan Russia investigations conducted by the Intelligence Committees as she said she would,” said Erin Pelton, a spokesperson for Rice, who served as national security adviser and the US ambassador to the United Nations under Obama.
Rice has denied that her unmasking of Michael Flynn in numerous foreign intelligence documents was in any way wrong and/or intended solely as a means to exact political retribution for an election that went horribly wrong for her party.
Instead, Rice recently sat down for an interview with New York Magazine and explained that she’s unfairly being targeted by a bunch of racist, sexist Republicans…shocking, we never would have seen that coming.
“Let me just put it this way, I do not leap to the simple explanation that it’s only about race and gender. I’m trying to keep my theories to myself until I’m ready to come out with them. It’s not because I don’t have any.”
Rice’s testimony is even more important in light of a newly released court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) which found that the Obama administration routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall. In describing the violations, the FISA court said the illegal searches conducted by the NSA under Obama were “widespread” and created a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”
The court order goes on to reveal that NSA analysts had been conducting illegal queries targeting American citizens “with much greater frequency than had previously been disclosed to the Court”…an issue which the court described as a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”
“Since 2011, NSA’s minimization procedures have prohibited use of U.S.-person identifiers to query the results of upstream Internet collection under Section 702. The October 26, 2016 Notice informed the Court that NSA analysts had been conducting such queries in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had previously been disclosed to the Court.”
“At the October 26, 2016 hearing, the Court ascribed the government’s failure to disclose those IG and OCO reviews at the October 4, 2016 hearing to an institutional ‘lack of candor’ on NSA’s part and emphasized that ‘this is a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.'”
But, we wouldn’t worry too much…clearly the FISA court is run by a bunch of racist, sexist people as well…
via http://ift.tt/2t64SYJ Tyler Durden