Rice has not commented on the report. It would likely be legal for Rice to request the unmasking—“The standard for senior officials to learn the names of U.S. persons incidentally collected is that it must have some foreign intelligence value, a standard that can apply to almost anything,” Lake notes.

As Lake notes, nothing he—or anyone else—has uncovered lends credence to President Trump’s outlandish and unsupported claim that Obama ordered surveillance of him at Trump Tower prior to the election. Nor does the new story suggest any illegal behavior on Rice’s part. As with each step in the story, this one offers only a small sliver of information. Many experts seem to think the Bloomberg View story does not imply anything improper or unusual. Others withheld judgment, saying there’s simply not enough information to judge.

“In a situation where there’s incidental collection and it appears that they’re discussing U.S. incoming or current officials, it would not be unusual for a national security adviser to try to understand what it is this foreign government is trying to do to manipulate their position against the U.S.,” said Nada Bakos, a former CIA analyst and national-security commentator. “That’s how the game is played.”

Assuming Lake’s story is accurate, why would Rice have wanted to have names unmasked?

One possibility is that Rice was acting in connection with a joint investigation into Russian meddling in the election. The government had already concluded, based on the assessments of multiple intelligence agencies, that Russia was meddling in the election. There were also ongoing investigations into potentially illegal behavior by Trump staffers. Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, was reportedly already being examined for his contacts with Russia, as were other Trump aides, current and former.

A second possibility is that it was simply the course of business to try to figure out what foreign governments were thinking. If foreign officials were seeking to shape U.S. policy or get a leg up, intercepts could have been useful to the national security adviser, and Rice might have wanted names unmasked to make those intercepts intelligible. It is still not clear whether Trump transition team officials were directly incidentally collected (i.e., they were in conversation with surveillance targets) or indirectly collected (i.e., they were mentioned during conversations between a third party and surveillance targets, and then masked).

Typically, an administration might be able to glean some of this information from communications with the incoming team. But ties were strained between the Obama administration and Trump transition, and both were effectively conducting foreign policy at the same time. That’s unusual—typically, the new administration keeps its head down until January 20—but Trump and his aides were speaking out on a variety of issues.