Liberal Forum

Termin8tor » 03 Apr 2017 11:07 pm » wrote:Eli Lake said on Mark Levin's show that this is just the beginning, and he expects much more to come out. Levin has said it's a huge scandal.

Eli Lake, the Bloomberg View columnist who wrote the report, noted in his piece that “some intelligence value” is required for senior officials to request that U.S. persons’ names be unmasked, and that as a result, Rice’s alleged requests were “likely within the law.”

The intelligence reports in question were primarily summaries of conversations between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, as well as communications between Trump staffers and foreign officials being monitored by the U.S. government, according to Lake’s reporting.

On Sunday night, far-right blogger and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich published a post claiming (without citing sources) that former Obama administration National Security Advisor Susan Rice had requested the names of the Trump staffers caught in NSA surveillance of Russian figures.

The next day, Bloomberg's Eli Lake published a story alleging that Rice's request for unmasking was discovered in NSA logs by a Trump staffer.

According to Lake, it was likely these reports were given to Nunes, sparking his briefing to the press on March 22.

The story was quickly picked up by a slew of right-wing media sites as "proof" that Trump was right about the wiretapping — and that the Obama administration had been conspiring to spy on Trump and gather damaging intelligence on his campaign.

Even Lake's story for Bloomberg, which is the most mainstream exposure the story has received, maintains that "Rice's requests to unmask the names of Trump transition officials do not vindicate" Trump's accusations of wiretapping.