At one point in the interview, Mitchell seemed on the verge of asking Rice point-blank if she had requested unmasking of any Trump team officials, but then added, “in order to spy on them?”

“Absolutely not for any political purposes, to spy, expose, anything,” Rice said, adding there was “no equivalence between unmasking and leaking.”

She said she had not leaked any information about Michael Flynn, who succeeded her as national-security adviser before being forced to resign for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with the Russian ambassador. “I leaked nothing to nobody, and never have, and never would,” Rice said. She said she learned only through press reports that Flynn had been lobbying for the Turkish government without disclosing his activity. She would not say whether she had any suspicions about Flynn.

As for Trump’s allegation he had been subject to surveillance, ordered by President Obama, prior to the election, Rice said, “There was no collection or surveillance on Trump Tower or Trump individuals, and by that I mean directed by the White House or targeted at Trump individuals.”

Rice spoke to PBS’s Judy Woodruff in March, and gave an answer that appears contradictory and misleading about any surveillance. Woodruff asked Rice about House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes’s statements that Trump transition team members were caught up in incidental collection.

“I know nothing about this,” Rice told Woodruff. “I was surprised to see accounts from Chairman Nunes on that today.”

As Rice was speaking to MSNBC on Tuesday, Representative Adam Schiff, Nunes’s Democratic counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee, announced the reports Nunes viewed would soon be made available to both the House and Senate intelligence committees.

On Tuesday, MSNBC’s Mitchell noted that some Republicans were suggesting Rice be subpoenaed about collection of Trump officials. Rice declined to say whether she would be willing to testify, saying, “Let’s see what comes.”

Rice’s repeated statements she could and would not reveal classified information point to the central ambiguity in this story. Over time, a very loose image has emerged of what might have been collected or might not have. But that image is severely constrained by the fact that most of the relevant information is classified, and Nunes himself has been accused of improperly revealing classified information. The low-information landscape has made for a fertile partisan battle, but makes it challenging to understand what really happened and who is telling the truth.

It is not clear, for example, whether Trump officials’ communications were incidentally collected through conversations with surveillance targets, or were simply mentioned in conversations that were collected. There’s also no reliable information on how many times, and when, Rice requested unmasking of Trump officials, nor of whether other officials also requested unmasking.