Then-U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images

There is no reason to believe Rice did anything wrong

There are two important things to note about this controversy. The first is that the revelations about Rice do not in any way support the president's claim that team Obama "wire tapped" Trump Tower during the campaign. The timing is off — the intercepts Rice sought access to cover the transition, not the campaign — and getting the name of an American caught up in lawful US surveillance of foreign nationals is completely different from an illegal wiretap targeting the president's chief political opponent. The second is that there is no evidence whatsoever that Rice's behavior was improper. The closest thing to such evidence is an anonymously sourced report, from Bloomberg View's Eli Lake, that the contents of the intercepted calls contained important information about the Trump people. "One US official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration," Lake writes. But Lake's story contains a vital detail to understanding this. He notes that the intercepted conversations "were primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials." This means that Rice wasn't sifting through the Trump administration's internal conversations to find their secrets. Either the Trump transition officials were sharing these vital secrets with foreign officials, on calls they should have known were being monitored, or the foreign officials had learned this information somewhere else and were discussing it among themselves. Either way, potentially valuable information about the next US administration had gotten into the hands of foreign governments. It would be surprising if America's national security adviser didn't want the names of Trump officials who were involved in these calls in order to identify possible counterintelligence risks. Business Insider's Natasha Bertrand asked four separate intelligence experts, of varying ideological stripes, whether they thought the behavior described by Lake was improper. Their answer was unanimous: It wasn't. "We should be disturbed if whoever was in office was not keeping close tabs on that sort of thing," Paul Pillar, a 28-year CIA veteran and current Georgetown University professor, told Bertrand. "This whole story strikes me as just more of the effort to divert attention from the issue of the relations that Trump and his associates have had with Russia, and as part of the diversion to try to suggest impropriety of some sort on the part of the Obama administration." Nadio Bakos another longtime CIA analyst and current senior fellow at the right-leaning Foreign Policy Research Institute, tweeted a similar assessment to Pillar's. Bakos tweet "She was the National Security Advisor reading a report of foreign officials discussing US persons coming into [the White House]," Bakos tweeted. "This isn't odd or wrong."

What Rice actually did

To understand the Rice allegations, and why intelligence experts are so skeptical about any allegations of wrongdoing, you need to understand a little bit about how American spies actually work. While government surveillance of US citizens is heavily constrained by statute and the US Constitution, spying on foreigners is relatively easy. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows secret courts to issue surveillance warrants for non-Americans, which they are very willing to grant. In 2015, the FBI and the NSA — the two agencies that handle most electronic surveillance — asked for a combined total of 1,457 FISA surveillance warrants. Not a single request was denied. Oftentimes, targets of FISA warrants — like foreign diplomats — speak to or about Americans on the phone. The result is an American being accidentally surveilled, or an American's personal information being collected, under a warrant that's supposed to target foreigners only. This is called "incidental collection" in intelligence jargon, and it creates a bit of a privacy rights dilemma. You don't want to let the US intelligence community use FISA warrants as a backdoor way of spying on US citizens, and you also don't want the names of Americans who have been surveilled incidentally to leak publicly. The solution is a process called "minimization," wherein the name of US citizens on the call or mentioned on the call is replaced with some kind of descriptor in the intelligence community's write-ups. Let's say the US government has a FISA warrant on my fiancée, who is Canadian, and intercepts some boring call we have about groceries. She would be identified by name in the transcript, but I would be referred to as something like "Journalist #1" or "Relative #2." On occasion, high-level officials — say, the national security adviser — can ask the intelligence community to reveal the names of Americans picked up in the surveillance. Theoretically, they're only supposed to ask for someone to be "unmasked" when the report is unintelligible without the person's identity OR when there's a compelling national security reason to do so (like if a suspected foreign terrorist was talking to a US citizen about their joint plan to blow up a building). Such requests make a lot of sense, and do happen with some frequency. But out of context, it sounds scary — the US government is trying to find out individual citizens' names on warrants that are supposed to target foreigners! This is what Nunes's initial disclosures last month were all about. Nunes announced that US intelligence had incidentally collected information on Trump transition officials and, moreover, that the names of these Trump officials had been unmasked. This did raise some questions about privacy rights. But because Nunes was extremely vague about who was unmasked and why, the controversy didn't initially focus on that aspect of things. The Rice reports have refocused things significantly, linking the unmasking to a specific Trump administration official. This led, almost immediately, to speculation that Rice had asked for the unmasking for improper political reasons — building off Trump's unsubstantiated allegation that Obama had spied on him during the campaign. By giving Republicans a specific target, rather than a vague one, they could make a lot more hay out of unmasking allegations — even though if you understand how surveillance actually works, you realize that what Rice was doing was fairly routine. The fact that Susan Rice is the one at the center of the new flap, and not a different former Obama administration official, was the last ingredient necessary to turn this non-scandal into a conservative obsession.

How this nothingburger became such a big deal