House Republicans Secretly Gathering Evidence To Launch Case Against DOJ and FBI: Report

According to Politico, a group of frustrated Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee led by Devin Nunes (R-CA) have been gathering in secret for several weeks to build a case against senior leaders of the Justice Department and the FBI for what they say is "improper" and perhaps criminal mishandling of the salacious and unproven 34-page Trump-Russia dossier, according to four sources familiar with their plans. 

Devin Nunes (R-CA)

A subset of the Republican members of the House intelligence committee, led by Chairman Devin Nunes of California, has been quietly working parallel to the committee’s high-profile inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. […]

 

The people familiar with Nunes’ plans said the goal is to highlight what some committee Republicans see as corruption and conspiracy in the upper ranks of federal law enforcement. The group hopes to release a report early next year detailing their concerns about the DOJ and FBI, and they might seek congressional votes to declassify elements of their evidence. -Politico

When pressed for details, Reps Mike Conway (R-TX) and Peter King (R-NY) were mum, with Conway telling POLITICO, "I don"t want talk about what we do behind closed doors." 

Nunes" has gone on record several times to discuss his feelings over the government law enforcement, telling Fox News "I hate to use the word corrupt, but they"ve become at least so dirty that who"s watching the watchmen? Who"s investigating these people?" adding "There is no one." 

House and Senate Republicans have joined countless voices, including President Trump"s outside counsel, Jay Sekulow, to launch a second Special Counsel to investigate the FBI and Justice Department to find out what role the salacious dossier played in the Trump-Russia investigation, as well as a trove of anti-Trump text messages sent between lead FBI investigator Peter Strzok to his FBI attorney mistress Lisa Page while the two of them were working together on both the Clinton email investigation and the Trump-Russia investigation.

Republicans in the Nunes-led group suspect the FBI and DOJ have worked either to hurt Trump or aid his former campaign rival Hillary Clinton, a sense that has pervaded parts of the president’s inner circle. Trump has long called the investigations into whether Russia meddled in the 2016 election a “witch hunt,” and on Tuesday, his son Donald Trump Jr. told a crowd in Florida the probes were part of a “rigged system” by “people at the highest levels of government” who were working to hurt the president.

House Intel Committee member Jim Jordan (R-OH) told Fox News yesterday that they are now considering contempt of the FBI and DOJ leadership and subpoenas over anti-Trump bias:

I think they were putting together a plan to stop Donald Trump from being the next president of the United States. I think it’s amazing in spite of the fact that the Democrats were against him, the Republican establishment was against him, the mainstream press was against him. and now I believe the FBI and the Justice Department were against him, the American people still said that’s the guy we want to be the next president.

“I believe that fake dossier was used as the basis to get Warren to now what we learn about Peter Strzok and Bruce Ohr and the FBI and the Justice Department,” said Jordan, adding, “Everything points to the fact that there was an orchestrated plan to try to prevent Donald Trump from becoming the President of the United States.”

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

Meanwhile, Trey Gowdy - who notably chose not to call on key witness Peter Strzok or demoted DOJ official Bruce Ohr for testimony - is apparently not included in the group seeking to build a case. As POLITICO reports, "A congressional aide with knowledge of the meetings said Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) was not among the participants. ”While he does believe the FBI and DOJ have recently made decisions worth looking into, he is and will always be a defender of the FBI, DOJ and the special counsel," the aide said.

House Committees Announce Investigation Into Hillary"s Approval Of Russia"s Uranium One Deal

Today is shaping up to be a fairly bad day for Hillary Clinton.  Just moments after the House Judiciary and Oversight committees announced an investigation into Comey"s handling of the Hillary email investigation, the House Intelligence and Oversight committees have also announced an investigation in the Uranium One deal which handed Russia 20% of America"s uranium reserves and landed the Clinton Foundation some $145 million in donations and a $500,000 speaking gig for former President Bill Clinton.

As we"ve pointed out over the past couple of days, the Uranium One deal has recently resurfaced in public discussion after a former FBI informant came forward suggesting that he personally witnessed Russian operatives in a massive bribery, extortion and money laundering scheme discussing efforts to curry favor with the Clintons. The informant has requested an audience with certain Congressional committees but has so far been silenced by an NDA he signed with the FBI.

Here are a couple of our recent posts on the topic as a recap:

• FBI Uncovered Russian Bribery Plot Before Obama Approved Uranium One Deal, Netting Clintons Millions


• Emails Reveal Bill Clinton Met With Vladimir Putin Just Before Uranium One Deal


• FBI Informant "Threatened" After Offering Details Linking Clinton Foundation To Russian Bribery Case

As the The Hill points out, the Uranium One investigation will initially look into whether or not the FBI bothered to investigate the circumstances surrounding the approval of the deal which occurred during their ongoing investigation.

Two powerful House committees on Tuesday announced a joint investigation into the 2010 sale of a U.S. uranium company to a Russian company.

 

The two panels, the House Intelligence and Oversight Committees, will first probe whether there was an FBI investigation into the deal, approved when former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.

 

Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) on Monday cited “very, very real concerns about why we would allow a Russian-owned company to get access to 20 percent of America’s uranium supply.”

 

“It’s important we find out why that deal went through.”

 

A confidential informant has come forward to the committees, according to Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), and the two panels are currently in discussions with the Justice Department to release that individual from a nondisclosure agreement.

Meanwhile, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes told reporters earlier that it"s too early to determine whether Hillary will be called to testify.

“It’s a little premature. Let us first determine whether or not there was an open investigation by FBI or DOJ and then we’ll get back to you with more information,” Nunes told reporters.

WATCH LIVE: House Intel committee chair Devin Nunes holds a press conference https://t.co/T5uqoA85rO pic.twitter.com/pgfbQB0yBu

— CBS News (@CBSNews) October 24, 2017

Of course, Hillary once againg reiterated that concerns over the approval of the Uranium One deal, a deal which netted her family foundation $145 million in donations, by a committee on which she served is nothing but "politically motivated baloney."

"The Bombs Are Still Falling" - MSNBC Urges Government Censorship Of Social Media "To Protect Democracy"

Authored by Chris Reeves via NewsBusters.org,

On Friday’s Morning Joe, Willie Geist hosted a panel to discuss the latest news on the Russian hacking narrative regarding Facebook ads that were purportedly used by Russian intelligence to stoke "racial tensions" during the 2016 presidential election.

The panel’s primary reaction, with only one dissenting voice, was to call for increased government "regulation" and financial “penalties in the hundreds of millions” to shut down alleged Russian influencers.

The segment started off with Geist introducing the latest reporting on the topic:

GEIST: Twitter says it has shut down more than two-hundred accounts that were tied to the same Russian operatives who bought political ads on Facebook. Of the 450 accounts released by Facebook as part of its investigation, Twitter was able to match 22 of them to its own site. The disclosure by Twitter followed a briefing by company officials to staffers of the Senate and House Intel committees yesterday. Following that meeting, the top Democrat on the Senate committee, Mark Warner, slammed Twitter for its presentation.

SEN. MARK WARNER [D-VA]: [playing clip] The presentation that the Twitter team made to the Senate Intel staff today was deeply disappointing. The notion that their work was basically derivative based upon accounts that Facebook had identified showed enormous lack of understanding from the Twitter team of how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions, and, again, begs many more questions than they offered.

(...)

GEIST: The top Democrat on the House Intel Committee, Adam Schiff, also weighed in on Twitter’s briefing to his committee, releasing a statement that read, in part: "... it is clear that Twitter has significant forensic work to do to understand the depth and breadth of Russian activity during the campaign. This additional analysis will require far more robust investigation into how Russian actors used their platform as a part of their active measures campaign..."

Without any perceptible degree of skepticism about the Democratic Congressmen"s claims, Geist then teed up Nicolle Wallace, host of the MSNBC afternoon show Deadline: White House, to talk about social media and the 2016 election more generally:

GEIST: You do get the sense, Nicolle, that Facebook, Twitter, social media was totally clueless about what was happening on their sites during the 2016 campaign.

WALLACE: It"s worse than that [...]. The social media companies are sort of like the worst stereotype of a Republican political organization. They"re reactive, they’re opaque, they"re defensive, they are very slow to understand the value of transparency. They"re totally lawyered up, lobbied up. And they are as a culture, the hubris of thinking that they"re all about the public good, when if you take a low-tech analogy, it’s basically like someone got mugged in your backyard and their position is: well, it"s not our problem, I mean, we just bought the lot on which the house was built, not our problem.

Donny Deutsch chimed in his agreement with Wallace’s analysis, mainly to suggest that perhaps internet news sites and social media sites need government regulation to make sure that what they post or allow up is accurate:

DEUTSCH: [T]here’s a tremendous irony with these guys, because, the tech guys, these young-, are, are the ones who are revolutionizing the world for betterment, yet the irony is, if I wanna take an ad out on NBC or anyplace else for a laundry detergent, the things I have to go through-

WALLACE: [interrupting] It has to work, it has to be real, you have to be real. Right!

DEUTSCH: [continues talking over Wallace] -[...] to prove that it’s got 5% more blue crystals in it, yet there is no regulati[on]. There is nothing more important for us, for people watching this show over the next ten and twenty years as the regulation of these companies. They control the flow of communication. [...] [W]hat"s happening here, as far as our power versus what"s happening over here [points to his smart phone], multiply it a thousand-fold and there is no regulation.

Ah, so here we see one of the real reasons for wanting to regulate internet-based news content: it’s out-competing (supposedly) respectable news outlets like MSNBC!

After Deutsch floated the idea of government censorship to get the internet under control, Wallace decided to try her hand at stand-up comedy, declaring:

“One difference though is that we have quality controls, we have standards. [...] [A]nd they [internet/social media] should be held to the same standards.”

Well, if we all only had to adhere to MSNBC’s standard for truth, that would make our jobs here much easier!

But on a more serious note, Geist subsequently moved the segment forward to allow New York Times reporter Yamiche Alcindor to summarize her latest findings on “racially divisive Russian ads on Facebook.” Alcindor said:

Facebook admitted to members of the Congressional Black Caucus as well as the subcommittee on the House Oversight Committee that there were ads that were targeting Black Lives Matter and targeting, specifically, ethnic groups [...] and allowing people to target, not only for Russian influence, but also target housing ads, employment ads.

[...]

[A] lot of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus are fuming because they"re saying that Russia actually exploited a lot of the racial divisions that already exist in America and used both Facebook and Twitter [...] in this way to essentially make people hate each other more.

So, Alcindor and the Congressional Black Caucus think that decades of the Democratic Party and the far left exploiting racial divisions for political gain was totally normal and fine, but now, they demand aggressive government action to stop it when it is being used by the Russians?

Without addressing this glaringly obvious point, the segment then moved in a much more interesting direction as Geist turned to Noah Rothman, associate editor of Commentary Magazine, for his opinion on the whole Russia matter. Although Rothman acceded to the larger narrative about Russians hacking the DNC and weaponizing social media, he did offer some true background to the current story:

First, you probably have to know that Russian intelligence is going to exploit anything they possibly can to do precisely what she was talking about. This isn"t new, this is the Kremlin playbook. They have been exacerbating racial tensions in the United States since there [has been] a Russian intelligence organization. As recently as 2014, you had RT talking about police tyranny and an Afro-Maidan, referring to the Ukrainian revolution that ousted the former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. This is what Russia does. So if you"re a media institution and you know that Moscow is going to target your audience, you have to be proactive and aware of that. And, as you say, you have, you had gatekeepers in most institutions. Institutions that are not, you know, aware that they"re going to be targeted are the most irresponsible, I would say. But I"m not sure that regulation is something that you can even entertain. This is about responsibility.

Rothman’s point about past Soviet infiltration of the United States was correct, if lacking somewhat in details. Rothman would have done well to point out, in contrast to his characterization of Russian government-owned or funded media, that they actually frequently take stances in support of left-wing causes if those causes serve to diminish America’s international moral authority, particularly as regards anti-war narratives or movements like Black Lives Matter.

It was also refreshing to see someone push back against Wallace and Deutsch’s calls for government censorship and control over the Internet, but that didn’t last. Mark Halperin ultimately decided to make the most straightforward case for the federal government to crack down on "Russian operatives" and fake news with the support of both Wallace and Deutsch:

HALPERIN: [T]here’s some interesting intellectual debates to be had around all this stuff to be sure. But these companies are American companies making a lot of money, dominating our lives, hiding behind a lot of intellectual arguments. And, as the Congressional members of both parties are saying publicly and privately, they are using lobbyists and PR executives and their own platforms to try to limit the disclosure that they make to be accountable. American democracy is under siege and they are hiding behind intellectual arguments.

[Deutsch tries to speak at same time as Wallace, then stops]

WALLACE: And it"s ongoing. I mean, they were involved, some of these Russian-linked Twitter accounts were involved last weekend in helping to sow-

EDDIE GLAUDE JR.: [interjecting] Exactly.

GEIST: [mumbles agreement] Right.

WALLACE: -hatred around the debate about the NFL. This isn’t, we"re not at a forensic stage where we"re gonna look back at what they did in 2016, we"re not even there yet. This is still-

HALPERIN: [interrupting] The bombs are still falling.

WALLACE: Right.

ROTHMAN: [tries to speak, hard to hear] Wait, to what extent is there even a recourse?

DEUTSCH: [interrupting] By the way, we can regulate, I’m gonna give you, we can regulate, we can regulate this. We start-, instead of the FCC, it’s the FDC. The Federal Digital Communications company. And there is a body, a governing body there, regulatory body, that when something like this happens, the, the economic consequence, the penalties in the hundreds of millions, you hit ‘em in the pocketbook, they"ll figure it out.

There are a lot of amazing comments here, particularly from Halperin and Deutsch.

It’s not completely clear what Deutsch means by using a "FDC" "regulatory body" to financially cripple people (or who precisely those people/organizations would be, although based on his following comments it might be Facebook and Twitter that would suffer fines in his mind). However, Halperin’s characterization of protecting people’s right to freedom of speech, guaranteed by the First Amendment, as “hiding behind intellectual arguments” was most chilling.

Thankfully, Rothman stepped in to voice some cogent defense of arguably this country’s most important founding principle: “I suppose there"s any number of ways in which the federal government could target an institution that is a media institution that provides a platform for the exercise of the First Amendment. What is the limiting principle there? At what point are we targeting speech that we simply don"t like?”

After a brief pause and Deutsch simply interjecting “um,” Wallace tried her Ministry of Truth argument out again:

WALLACE: Well you can"t yell [...] fire in a movie theater if it"s not true. I mean-

ROTHMAN: [interrupting] You can if it"s on fire.

WALLACE: Well, I think the point on Twitter is that some of these things are not true, and-

ROTHMAN: [interrupting] That’s, incitement to violence is one thing-

WALLACE: -Twitter, Twitter and Facebook have done nothing. I mean money,-

ROTHMAN: -and it’s extremely difficult to prove incitement to violence.

WALLACE: -mon-, money has a seal to, so that we know when a dollar is real, when a dollar is counterfeit. There are groups that are trying to get the social media companies to have some sort of water seal or to verify the content, the veracity of it.

It was fun to see Rothman trying, ever so subtly, to point out the basic problem with Wallace’s argument, namely: who determines what is and is not true?

But then Halperin, skirting by having to address Rothman’s concerns, decided to seal the deal and make his position extremely clear: “[T]he government shouldn"t be the recourse at first, it should be the boards of these companies.” That is, if Facebook and Twitter don’t start censoring in the right way or to the right extent, then Big Brother should do it himself.

It’s nice to know that the media’s support for the free speech rights of NFL football players extends to all of us rubes too!

The panel closed out the lengthy segment by chuckling at the prospect of quick action to "figure out" this "problem" and never addressed the more fundamental question about whether or not what they were proposing was anathema to the U.S. Constitution, either in law or spirit.

We strongly suggest putting down all sharp objects before watching the following...

Report: Former Obama Aide Ben Rhodes Now 'Person Of Interest' In House Intel Probe Of Unmaskings

Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

The noose is tightening...

Ben Rhodes, former aide to President Obama, is a "person of interest" in the House Intel Committee"s unmasking investigation, according to Sara Carter of Circa News.

Former Obama White House National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes is now an emerging as a person of interest in the House Intelligence Committee’s unmasking investigation, according to a letter sent Tuesday by the committee to the National Security Agency (NSA). This adds Rhodes to the growing list of top Obama government officials who may have improperly unmasked Americans in communications intercepted overseas by the NSA, Circa has confirmed.

House Intel Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) reportedly sent a letter to the NSA requesting information on the number of "unmasking" requests Rhodes made between Jan 1, 2016 and Jan 20, 2017, and have requested that the information be made available to the committee no later than August 21.

All Rhodes lead to jail?

If the unmasking rumors are true, Rhodes - a former deputy national security advisor under Obama, is in deep shit - joining a list of Obama admin officials included in the House Intel Committee probe, along with former CIA director John Brennan, Susan Rice, and former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power. A letter sent last week from Nunes to Trump"s director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, suggested that hundreds of unmasking requests were made during the 2016 presidential elections.

Per Circa:

The story, which was first reported by The Hill last week, stated that the requests were made without specific justifications as to why the unmasking was necessary. Rice and Brennan have confirmed they sought the unredacted names of Americans in NSA-sourced intelligence reports but insisted their requests were routine parts of their work and had no nefarious intentions.

Power also has legal authority to unmask officials, though the practice has not reportedly been common for someone in her position.

Last week, the Washington Examiner reported that Ben Rhodes sat down with the House Intelligence Committee, the same day Jared Kushner apparently dazzled them with his performance.

It was already known that Jared Kushner, top adviser and son-in-law to President Trump, on Tuesday spoke with members of the panel, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible ties to the Trump campaign. CNN’s Manu Raju tweeted Tuesday evening that the network’s chief political analyst Gloria Borger had learned that Rhodes also spoke to the committee.

The Intelligence Committee is investigating intelligence leaks, and Rhodes has become a person of interest for certain Republicans as someone who may be playing a role in the leaking of classified information from the Trump administration to reporters.

This news follows a report that Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) named Ben Rhodes as the creator of an "in-house echo chamber" meant to mislead reporters and the public about President Obama"s nuclear deal with Iran, stating “Any Obama holdover at any of these agencies, you’ve got to get them out of there because clearly they’re not on the same team and particularly on the [White House] National Security Council," adding “I think Congress and some members of the Intelligence Committee can call Ben Rhodes to testify . . . He may be able to invoke executive privilege from when Obama was president but he definitely can’t do that in any interactions he’s had since then." -Washington Free Beacon

Obama Aide Ben Rhodes will look great in an Orange jumpsuit #Busted #Unmasking #Jailtime

— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) August 2, 2017

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House Intel. Chair Accuses Obama Staffers of "Hundreds Of Unmasking Requests"

After being forced to recuse himself from his committee"s investigation of the "Russian meddling" controversy earlier this year (see: House Intel Committee Chair Nunes Recuses Himself From Russia Probe), Devin Nunes has thrust himself back into the national spotlight by drafting a letter to the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, saying he has evidence that several of Obama"s top political aides made hundreds of unmasking requests in the waning days of Obama"s administration even though they offered no legitimate reason to do so and some of them didn"t even serve in an intelligence position.

In Thursday’s letter, Nunes said the total requests for Americans’ names by Obama political aides numbered in the hundreds during Obama’s last year in office and often lacked a specific intelligence community justification. He called the lack of proper justifications a “serious deficiency.”

His letter noted requests from senior government officials, unlike career intelligence analysts, “made remarkably few individualized justifications for access” to the U.S. names.

“The committee has learned that one official, whose position had no apparent intelligence related function, made hundreds of unmasking requests during the final year of the Obama administration,” Nunes wrote. “Of those requests, only one offered a justification that was not boilerplate.”

“We have found evidence that current and former government officials had easy access to U.S. person information and that it is possible that they used this information to achieve partisan political purposes, including the selective, anonymous leaking of such information."

Of course, we pointed out last week (see: New Scapegoat Emerges In Unmasking Scandal: Meet Obama"s Former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power) that the official "whose position had no apparent intelligence related function" was likely Obama"s U.N. ambassador, Samantha Power.

Power appears to be central to efforts by top Obama administration officials to identify individuals named in classified intelligence community reports related to Trump and his presidential transition team.  If true, Power"s role in the unmasking efforts would be particularly questionable since it"s nearly inconceivable that her position as the U.N. ambassador would require such sensitive unmasking activities.

"Unmasking is not a regular occurrence—absolutely not a weekly habit. It is rare, even at the National Security Council, and ought to be rarer still for a U.N. ambassador," according to one former senior U.S. official who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.

"It might be defended when the communication in question relates directly to U.N. business, for example an important Security Council vote," explained the former official, who would only discuss the matter on background. "Sometimes it might be done out of other motives than national security, such as sheer curiosity or to defend a bureaucratic position. Or just plain politics."

The Intelligence Committee"s focus of Power and other key Obama officials is a prime example of the Obama administration"s efforts to spy on those close to Trump, according to sources familiar with the ongoing investigation.

"The subpoena for Power suggests just how pervasive the Obama administration"s spying on Americans actually was," said one veteran GOP political operative who has been briefed on the matter by senior Congressional intelligence officials. "The U.N. ambassador has absolutely no business calling for the quantity and quality of the intelligence that Power seems to have been asking for."

"That"s just not the sort of thing that she should have been concerned about, unless she was playing the role of political operative with the help of the intelligence community," the source said. "It gives away what was actually going on: the Obama administration was operating in a pervasive culture of impunity and using the intelligence community against their political opponents."

So, you"re saying that while Americans were being distracted with a barrage of "Russian meddling" stories, that Obama was working behind the scenes to transform our various intelligence agencies in this country into his very own political weapons of mass destruction? 

That sounds like a very serious 4th Amendment issue...we"re starting to see what the FISA courts were getting at:

"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.""

Obama-Era Officials Subpoenaed By House Intel Committee In Trump "Unmasking" Probe

While it was not surprising that as part of the ongoing probe into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 elections, the House Intel Committee issued a total of seven subpoenas on Wednesday as the WSJ reported, what was surprisng is that in addition to four subpoenas focusing purely on the Russia investigation, the Republican-led committee also issued three subpoenas focusing on "unmasking" questions, involving how and why the names of associates of President Donald Trump were unredacted and distributed within classified reports by Obama administration officials during the transition between administrations.

As part of the "unmasking" investigation, in addition to the NSA, the House committee also subpoeaned the FBI and the CIA for information on how and why Trump-linked names were exposed to the entire US intel community, and led to an avalanche of "unnamed sources" stories. Recall that typically information about Americans intercepted in foreign surveillance is redacted, even in classified reports distributed within the government, unless a compelling need exists to reveal them. Unmasking requests aren’t uncommon by top intelligence community officials but Republicans want to know whether any of the unmaskings of Trump campaign officials during the transition were politically motivated.

According to the WSJ, Republicans on the committee have been pushing for a thorough investigation of how the names of Trump campaign officials became exposed in classified intelligence reports based off intelligence community intercepts. Specifically, the three "unmaksing" subpoenas seek information on requests made by former national security adviser Susan Rice, former CIA Director John Brennan and former United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power for names to be unmasked in classified material.

The name of Samantha Power hasn’t previously been reported as a potential witness in the probe, and her inclusion in the subpoenas means that Republicans are also broadening their areas of investigation, the WSJ reports.

The House Intelligence Committee is one of two bodies currently probing the question of whether Russian meddled in the 2016 election and whether anyone from Trump’s campaign played a role.

Concurrently, the Senate Intelligence Committee is conducting its own investigation and has already issued subpoenas to Flynn and his businesses. Trump has said there was no collusion with Russia and called the investigation a witch hunt.

* * *

In addition to the above three, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and one of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyers, Michael Cohen, were also subpoenaed Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee. Subpoenas were also approved by the committee for documents in possession of the Flynn Intel Group LLC, and Michael D. Cohen & Associates PC, Bloomberg reported.

"We approved subpoenas for several individuals for testimony, personal documents and business records," Republican Mike Conaway of Texas, who is leading the probe, and Adam Schiff of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the House panel, said in a joint statement. "We hope and expect that anyone called to testify or provide documents will comply with that request, so that we may gain all the information within the scope of our investigation."

While Flynn has previously said he would invoke the Fifth to avoid testimony, Cohen dismissed any talk of collusion with Russia. “To date, there has not been a single witness, document or piece of evidence linking me to this fake Russian conspiracy," Cohen said in a statement Tuesday. "This is not surprising to me because there is none."

* * *

It would, of course, be quite ironic if as a result of all these various probe, investigations and "witch hunts", Trump is cleared of all "collusion" allegations, while members of the previous administration end up facing civil or criminal charges.

WSJ reports that Susan Rice Was Not Alone In "Unmasking" Team Trump

As part of its daily wrap of the Susan Rice newsflow, which focused on her first media appearance since she was "outed" as the persona responsible for "unmasking" members of team Trump, the WSJ provides two new pieces of incremental information: i) in addition to Michael Flynn, at least one more member of the Trump transition team was "unmasked" in intelligence reports due to multiple foreign conversations that weren"t related to Russia; and ii) Rice wasn"t the administration official who instigated Mr. Flynn’s unmasking, confirming there is at least one more high-level official giving "unmasking" orders.

But first, a brief detour.

"Unmasking" is a term used when the identity of a U.S. citizen or lawful resident is revealed in classified intelligence reports. Normally, when government officials receive intelligence reports, the names of American citizens are redacted to protect their privacy. But officials can request that names, listed as “U.S. Person 1,” for example, be unmasked internally in order to give context about the potential value of the intelligence. Unmasking is justified for national security reasons but is governed by strict rules across the U.S. intelligence apparatus that make it illegal to pursue for political reasons or to leak classified information generated by the process.

It is the accusation that Rice unmasked members for purely political reasons - ostensibly in coordination with president Obama - that has gotten Republican smelling blood in the water.  Republicans have for weeks signaled that they saw unmasking as the key to investigating the source of media leaks damaging to the Trump administration — such as the exposure of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was forced to resign in February after media reports revealed that he misled Vice President Pence about the contents of his discussions with the Russian ambassador.

To that end, earlier this month, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) pressed FBI Director James Comey in a public Intelligence Committee hearing: "It would be nice to know the universe of people who have the power to unmask a U.S. citizen’s name... because that might provide something of a roadmap to investigate who might’ve actually disseminated a masked U.S. citizen’s name.”

He went on to press Comey on whether specific Obama officials, including Rice, would have had the authority to request that a name be unmasked. “Yes, in general, and any other national security adviser would, I think, as a matter of their ordinary course of their business,” Comey answered.

Shortly thereafter, The Hill notes Nunes made his shocking announcement that he — and he alone — had viewed documents that showed inappropriate unmasking by Obama-era officials.

Today, Susan Rice came out to defend herself and told MSNBC that “the allegation is that somehow, Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes,” Rice told Mitchell. “That’s absolutely false."

She added that “The notion, which some people are trying to suggest, that by asking for the identity of the American person is the same is leaking it — that’s completely false. There is no equivalence between so-called unmasking and leaking.”

And yet, that is precisely what many republicans are suggesting because otherwise there is no explanation for how the WaPo and NYT received, on a virtual silver platter, stories about Mike Flynn"s communications with intel-level detail.

Perhaps Rice is simply lying as she lied on March 22 when in a PBS interview she said "I know nothing" about unmasking Trump officials. Less than two weeks later, we learn that she did.

But perhaps there is more to the story than what we know so far.

* * *

And this is where the WSJ comes in, with the new info that according to a Republican official familiar with deliberations by GOP lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee said that the names of two U.S. citizens who were part of Mr. Trump’s transition team have been unmasked in intelligence reports. One is Mr. Flynn and the other hasn’t been identified. The report involving Mr. Flynn documented phone conversations he had in late December with the Russian ambassador to the U.S.

The WSJ then reports that Rice had requested the unmasking of at least one
transition official — not Mr. Flynn — who was part of multiple foreign
conversations that weren"t related to Russia.

And the punchline: "The Republican official and others said Ms. Rice wasn"t the administration official who instigated Mr. Flynn’s unmasking."

In other words, the story that Susan Rice is the unmasker is incomplete as there is at least one more person exposing the identities of people in Trump"s circle, and that the NSA and other intel agencies have been surveiling, accidentally or otherwise,  at least one, so far unnamed individual, from Trump"s circle. It may well be someone that the WaPo and NYT have already published about, or it may be someone who has yet to hit the newswire, delivering the latest twist of the ongoing intelligence-fed news cycle.

For now the answer is unknown, although when Rice testifies under oath before the House Intel Committee, we hope that all outstanding questions will finally get answers.