Susan Rice isn't sure whether race and gender were behind recent GOP attacks on her and her job as former President Barack Obama's national security advisor, but she isn't ruling it out.
Rice was asked during a New York magazine interview about being a “target” of President Donald Trump’s administration earlier this year.
“Why me? Why not Jay Carney, for example, who was then our press secretary, who stood up more?” she asked.
Asked if the Republican scrutiny related to her being an African-American woman, Rice brought up other women in public life who she said have also been the subject of unfair treatment, including Hillary and Condoleezza Rice.
“Let me just put it this way, I do not leap to the simple explanation that it’s only about race and gender,” she told New York Magazine. “I’m trying to keep my theories to myself until I’m ready to come out with them. It’s not because I don’t have any.”
Rice came under public fire in April after it emerged she reportedly sought names of Trump-transition officials who had come up in surveillance of foreign agents.
In an interview with The New York Times’ Glenn Thrush, Trump suggested she was a criminal.
“Do you think she might have committed a crime?” asked Thrush, to which trump responded with a yes.
In her interview with New York Magazine, Rice responded to that, saying:
“It was kind of a week of WTF. Or two. Because it’s something made up out of whole cloth.”
The article has drawn criticism on social media: