President Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice told Congressional investigators she ‘unmasked’ the identity of top Trump officials over an undisclosed meeting they had with the prince of the United Arab Emirates, CNN has learned.
Rice told members of the House Intelligence Committee last week that she requested names of Americans to be revealed from intelligence reports internally after the UAE’s crown prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan arrived in New York last December without notifying the US government.
The crown prince had met with Trump officials including the president’s ex-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and another now-former White House official, Steve Bannon, sources told CNN.
The effort preceded the UAE trying to set up a backchannel between Russia and the incoming Trump administration.
President Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice told Congressional investigators that she ‘unmasked’ Trump officials during the transition because they met with a prince from the United Arab Emirates, who hadn’t informed the US government of his travels
Rice declined to comment to CNN about her testimony.
Rice had received criticism for her role in ‘unmasking’ Americans by Republicans including the president and lawmakers like Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who is part of the House panel investigating the Russian matter.
Trump had suggested she had done something illegal.
Gowdy, however, told the Daily Caller that there was ‘nothing that came up in her interview that led me to conclude’ she had improperly unmasked any Trump officials or leaked their names to the press.
Other Republicans, too, have seemed to have backed off.
‘I think what she did in her role was perfectly appropriate, so I think that people were impressed with her testimony,’ said the committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.
As for Trump’s accusations that Rice had broken the law, Schiff commented: ‘It looks now like it did at the time, a baseless accusation and a slander against a dedicated public servant, not unlike the president’s suggestion that he had been illegally wiretapped at Trump Tower,’ the lawmaker said on CNN shortly after the UAE story broke.
The December Trump Tower meeting, which took place in the transition period between the Obama and Trump administrations, happened before the UAE brokered a meeting to open lines of communication between Russia and the United States.
Both CNN and the Washington Post reported that there had been a meeting in the Seychelles Islands, located in the Indian Ocean, which is now under investigation by lawmakers as they probe connections between Russia and the Trump campaign.