Graham: Congress should look into Susan Rice reports

Sen. Lindsey Graham said Tuesday that Congress should look into reports that Susan Rice, former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, had requested that the names of Trump transition team officials be unmasked in some intelligence reports.

“I'm not going to prejudge here, but 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,” Graham told Fox News. “It should be easy to figure out, and we will.”


Rep. Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, provoked controversy last month when he said the communications of some Trump transition officials seemed to have been incidentally picked up by U.S. intelligence officials last year.

Nunes said the monitoring appeared to have been legal, meaning the Trump officials may have been speaking to foreigners who were under surveillance by the U.S. when their communications were picked up. But he raised the concern that the Trump officials monitored should not have been identified, or “unmasked,” in the intelligence reports he saw.

News reports on Monday suggested that Rice had requested some of the unmasking in question. The reports prompted accusations from conservatives and Trump allies that she might have done so for political reasons.

Graham made a point to say that he did not know whether Rice acted improperly, or whether the reports were true, and he said lawmakers need to speak with former Obama administration officials John Brennan and James Clapper about the alleged unmasking requests. "When it comes to Susan Rice, you need to verify, not trust," Graham said.

“It wouldn't surprise me if somebody in the Obama administration like Susan Rice would do this,” said the South Carolina Republican. “But I'm not going to prejudge. There's a way to find out. I intend to find out.”

Other Republicans made similar calls on Tuesday. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that the Senate Intelligence Committee should review the documents and the unmasking requests, saying the reports raise "serious questions."

"Our intelligence surveillance activities are obviously very controversial," Cotton said. "They’ve been more so over the last four years since the Edward Snowden disclosures. The last thing we need are political operatives in the White House fooling around with intelligence to make it harder to pass the laws we need to keep America safe."

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, a libertarian-leaning Republican, said on MSNBC that Rice “ought to be under subpoena.”

Saying that he had been “warning about these back-door searches for years, and that they could be politicized,” Paul said: “The facts will come out with Susan Rice, but I think she ought to be under subpoena, and she needs to be asked, 'Did you talk to the president about it? Did President Obama know about this?'”

Paul also reiterated his defense of President Donald Trump’s still-unsupported claims that Obama ordered a wiretap of his Trump Tower phone lines, suggesting that the reports about Rice are “actually eerily similar to what Trump accused them of, which is eavesdropping on conversations for political reasons.”

No evidence has emerged to suggest that Obama ordered surveillance of Trump or his associates, and FBI Director James Comey said last month that there was no evidence to support Trump’s claim.

Kelsey Sutton contributed to this report.