WASHINGTON – The Senate Intelligence Committee chairman is not ruling out interviewing former national security adviser Susan Rice over allegations that she sought to have the identities of President Donald Trump and members of his transition team revealed in foreign surveillance reports.
“If the reports are right,” Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., said Tuesday, “then she will be of interest to us.”
Some Republican lawmakers have been clamoring for the Senate Intelligence Committee to force Rice to testify under oath after a report from Bloomberg’s Eli Lake suggested Rice on dozens of occasions requested the identities of people connected to Trump be “unmasked.”
“When it comes to Susan Rice, you need to verify, not trust,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Tuesday during an interview on Fox News. “I think every American should know whether or not the national security adviser to President Obama was involved in unmasking Trump transition figures for political purposes.”
Rice has denied the allegations, calling them “absolutely false” in an MSNBC interview on Tuesday.
The focus on Rice comes as lawmakers are trying to iron out why House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., went to the White House grounds two weeks ago to view documents that he says suggest members of the Trump transition team’s identities were potentially improperly unmasked. A Washington Post report found that at least three White House officials are tied to the files that were shared with Nunes, while the Bloomberg report suggests that those officials began handling the files after they discovered Rice’s requests to unmask certain people’s identities.
Nunes would not comment Monday night on whether Rice was in any way associated with the documents he had seen.
But Republicans have long been suspicious of Rice, who emerged as a central figure in the party’s long probe of what led to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya in 2012.
“Susan Rice is the Typhoid Mary of the Obama administration foreign policy. Every time something went wrong, she seemed to turn up in the middle of it,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Tuesday on Hugh Hewitt’s radio program.
He also said there was “no doubt” that Rice should be the subject of a committee hearing, pledging that the Intelligence Committee “ought to review . . . and will review” both Rice’s alleged actions and questions raised by Nunes’ claims.
(c) 2017, The Washington Post ยท Karoun Demirjian
