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Josh Marshall: De-Derping the 'Un-Masking' Story
De-Derping the 'Un-Masking' Story
ByJosh Marshall
PublishedApril 3, 2017, 7:21 PM EDT
My read on Eli Lake's story about Susan Rice 'unmasking' Trump transition officials is that it's a rather elaborate attempt to make a scandal out of something that isn't scandalous at all. Given what we know just about Mike Flynn's activities in November and December of 2016 alone, Rice's alleged actions don't seem that surprising at all. National security experts seem to agree.
But here's something in the story that got my attention.
Read this paragraph, the third graf down in the story.
The National Security Council's senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, was conducting the review, according to two U.S. officials who spoke with Bloomberg View on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. In February Cohen-Watnick discovered Rice's multiple requests to unmask U.S. persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities. He brought this to the attention of the White House General Counsel's office, who reviewed more of Rice's requests and instructed him to end his own research into the unmasking policy.
What jumps out to me here is the last sentence. Cohen-Watnick, whose new boss, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, was trying to fire him while all this was happening, took his 'research' to the White House Counsel's Office. They reviewed what he had come up with, did some additional research on Rice's requests and then "instructed him to end his own research."
This is all very cryptic and it's sort of a throwaway line in Lake's story. It's so spare you could read a number of possibilities into the sentence. Maybe the Counsel's office said, 'Wow, this is so big we need to take over this critical investigation you've started. Thank you so much for your work.' But that does not seem like the most likely read.
I would suggest that a much more plausible read is that Cohen-Watnick brought his 'research' to the Counsel's office, they looked at and basically said, 'Knock it off.'
That would make sense on a few fronts.
As even Lake concedes, Rice's alleged actions - if the report is accurate - were almost certainly legal. Most national security experts say they were not only legal but entirely proper. Moreover, the kind of snooping around that Cohen-Watnick was apparently doing could very plausibly be interpreted as an attempt to monitor or interfere with the on-going counter-intelligence probe of Trump associates' ties to Russia. The White House Counsel's job is to protect and look after the legal interests of the President. A good lawyer would likely want to shut that kind of freelancing down right away, especially if what Cohen-Watnick had found didn't amount to anything that helped the President or the White House.
more...
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/de-derping-the-un-masking-story
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