Rand Paul: Did Obama Direct Susan Rice to Spy on Americans?

In an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul said he was not satisfied with what Susan Rice has said publicly about the scandal currently erupting in Washington.

Speaking to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Rice failed to confirm or deny reports that she had requested the unmasking of Donald Trump’s American associates caught incidentally in surveillance of foreign targets. Instead, she simply said that unmasking in general is done “to protect the American people and to do our jobs.” She said that when it came to unmasking people for political purposes, however, she never “leaked nothing to nobody.”

Paul noted that she had dodged the central issue.

“I don’t think she answered the question,” he said. Paul said Rice needed to tell Congress why she requested these names and whether or not it had anything to do with the original intention of the surveillance operation. Furthermore, he said, if it was a criminal matter, why wasn’t the FBI involved?

Paul said that Rice should testify before Congress, if not a grand jury, and prove that her actions were not political in nature. And if she were to testify, Paul said he had a question he was dying to hear the answer to:

“Did the president direct you to eavesdrop and sift through intelligence?”

Good question. We’d also like to hear from Barry on that one.

It’s fitting that all of this should break just as a couple of serious global security threats are breaking in Syria and North Korea. The lunatics who preside over those two countries (and in Syria’s case, “country” is a rather generous term to use, but okay) were allowed to run roughshod over the U.S. and its allies for years. And now President Trump has to deal with the issues that Obama chose not to.

And what was the Obama administration so busy doing that they didn’t have time to keep tabs on these developing crises? Apparently they were distracting the intelligence community with political spy operations intended to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. Apparently they were hunting down names of Trump associates and finding ways to leak them to the press. Apparently this is what Obama had his people doing instead of handling our foreign and domestic security.

Not only does this reflect badly on the Obama administration, it undermines the public’s trust in the intelligence community – trust that is already at an all-time low. With this fiasco, the various spy agencies have given privacy advocates all the ammunition they need to argue for reduced surveillance – a step that could put the country at greater risk in these Islamist times. But how can security hawks assure concerned Americans that they are safe from unwarranted intrusion…when clearly they are not?

Liberals were certain that Obama’s legacy would only improve with time.

Instead, it’s beginning to look like things were even worse than they seemed.