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Let me guess. You read about Obama's national security adviser
who unmasked the names of Trump associates who were caught up in
surveillance and are bewildered that the media is even covering
this nothing-burger. It's a diversion from the real story: how
the president and his associates collaborated with a Russian
influence operation against the U.S. election.

Or perhaps you are sick of hearing about Russia. After all, no
one has presented any evidence that President Donald Trump or
his team colluded with the Russians. Even James Clapper,
President Barack Obama's director of national intelligence, last
month acknowledged he saw no such evidence. The Russia story is
#fakenews, to borrow a hashtag of the moment. The real story is
about the Obama administration's politicization of state
surveillance.

Let me suggest that both stories are something-burgers.
Depending on where the facts lead, we will know whether Obama's
national security adviser, Susan Rice, was justified in
unmasking the names of Trump transition officials or whether the
media's obsession with the government's Russia investigation was
warranted.

Let's start with the Russia allegations. At this point, even
Trump has reluctantly acknowledged that Russia is responsible
for the hack of leading Democrats' emails during the election.
As the U.S. intelligence community has concluded, those hacks
were part of an elaborate operation to discredit the Democratic
nominee in 2016, Hillary Clinton. This campaign included fake
news, Twitter bots that promoted fake stories, hacking, and
distributing hacked emails through WikiLeaks.

It's possible that Trump was just an unwitting beneficiary of
this foreign meddling. But he and his associates have seemingly
gone out of their way to act guilty. Trump seemed to be the last
public figure to acknowledge the Russian hacks, even though
everyone in his national security cabinet has pinned the blame
on Moscow without condition. If he had nothing to hide, why was
he clinging to that position? What's more, the Trump team denied
having contact with Russians, and then those contacts were
disclosed to the press. And Trump has shown no interest in
deterring the Russians and other hostile powers from interfering
in U.S. politics in the future.

And there are other suspicious facts as well. At this point, it
looks like Paul Manafort, who served as Trump's campaign
chairman, was an unregistered foreign agent for the pro-Russian
government in Ukraine that was ousted in the 2014 popular
uprising there. The Associated Press reported last month that
Manafort had also been paid by a Russian oligarch, Oleg
Deripaska, between 2005 and 2009 to help influence U.S. policy
on behalf of Russia. Trump fired Manafort in August, after
Ukrainian investigators discovered Manafort's name on a ledger
listing alleged cash payouts from Ukraine's former ruling party
to various cronies as part of an influence-peddling scheme.

No wonder there is an open FBI investigation into Russian
influence in the U.S. election, and no wonder the bureau's
investigators are also examining the role of Trump associates in
all of this.

That investigation is warranted. But in the meantime, Trump's
political opponents have weaponized the allegations of collusion
against him. This does not support Trump's claim that Obama
illegally wiretapped Trump Tower. But one can see why Trump is
worried his predecessor ginned up the surveillance state against
him, and also why he hopes to conflate the two issues.

As the New York Times reported on March 1, Obama's aides sought
to preserve intelligence on Russia's influence operation and
ties to Trump in the final days of his presidency. That included
an effort to lower the classification on analysis of this
information so it could be distributed more widely within the
government and to allies in Congress.

We already know that leaks about Trump's first national security
adviser, Michael Flynn, and his conversations with the Russian
ambassador forced his resignation. There were also the reports
on Jeff Sessions and his meeting with Russia's ambassador, after
Sessions denied any contact with Russian officials.

Tuesday on MSNBC, Rice herself denied leaking anything. But that
denial may be less than meets the eye. Rice may not have spoken
to any reporters about intelligence she read about Trump and
Russia, but did she discuss this with her colleagues? Did any of
her colleagues then pass information along to the media?

Even if we take Rice at her word, it's still important to
highlight a key point about Rice's interview on Tuesday: She
declined to answer questions about whether she sought to unmask
Trump transition officials or whether the pace of those requests
increased after the election. This week the ranking Democrats on
the House and Senate intelligence committees have said the issue
of unmasking will be examined in the broader investigation into
Russia and the election.

A final point needs to be made in both of these story lines. We
don't have all the facts yet in either situation, but in both
cases elements of the scandal are in public view.

On the matter of Russia and Trump, the Republican campaign's
symbiosis with the Russian operation was not hidden. It happened
in plain sight. Ahead of Election Day, Trump made the stolen
emails published by WikiLeaks a key part of his strategy. His
campaign highlighted them. Trump talked about them at his
rallies. In some cases, Trump and his associates also repeated
fake news stories generated by the Russians, a point made
powerfully last week in testimony by former FBI officer Clint
Watts before the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Trump
campaign did all of this after the media and the U.S. government
had accused Russia of hacking the Democrats. Even Senator Marco
Rubio, who ended up supporting Trump, warned during the campaign
against using the WikiLeaks documents for political gain.
Whether Trump was secretly colluding with the Russians in
advance or simply following their public cues, he used the
information Moscow had stolen for political gain.

In the case of politicized surveillance, a real scandal is found
in a talking point repeated this week by Rice and her defenders.
In her interview with MSNBC, Rice said it was fairly routine for
her to unmask the names of U.S. persons in the summaries of raw
intelligence she received. As I reported Monday, the standard
for unmasking when requested by a senior official is simply that
it helps to better understand that piece of foreign
intelligence. As numerous experts have since said, unmasking is
pretty common. Even if Rice did not break the law (and it
appears she did not), the scandal is that what she did was most
likely legal. It is not outrageous that a national security
adviser can discover the names of Americans caught up in legal
surveillance of others when there is a threat of a terrorist or
cyber attack. It is outrageous that it's so easy to do this in
the absence of such a rationale.

Intelligence community leaders have repeatedly assured the
public that there are strict rules for redacting the names of
U.S. persons who are incidentally recorded as the government
eavesdrops on foreign and criminal targets. While it's true that
line analysts at the National Security Agency or the FBI take
great pains to redact those names, what good are these
protections if they can be unmasked with such a flimsy criterion?

What's more, there is at least some precedent on this issue. As
the Wall Street Journal reported at the end of 2015, the Obama
White House ended up learning the identities of members of
Congress and Jewish organizations that were in discussions with
Israeli senior officials during the fight over the Iran nuclear
deal. The monitoring of Israelis was entirely legal, but it is
troubling that the identities of the Americans with whom they
spoke were also known to the White House in the middle of a
bitter political fight over the agreement that defined Obama's
foreign policy legacy.

Concern about unmasking is not a smokescreen, a nothing-burger
or a diversionary tactic. It's a real story. So is how Russia
helped Trump win the White House. Don't trust anyone who says
"There's nothing to see here."

Update: After the publication of this column, Bloomberg received
a letter from Oleg Deripaska's lawyers stating that their
client's contracts with Paul Manafort "concerned investment
consulting services related to private commercial interests
only" and their client, "a private businessman, never intended
his agreements with Mr. Manafort to benefit the Russian
government -- let alone, to influence the U.S. elections in
favor of it."

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the
editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:
Eli Lake at elake1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Philip Gray at philipgray@bloomberg.net

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-05/the-real- political-scandal-actually-there-are-two
 

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