Susan Rice's request for the names of Donald Trump's associates mentioned in communications intercepted by security agencies was likely illegal — but it is doubtful the ex-national security adviser to former President Barack Obama can be held liable, former Rep. Pete Hoekstra told Newsmax TV.
"Personally, I don't think she's legally liable," Hoekstra, R-Mich., told host Steve Malzberg on Wednesday's "America Talks Live." "It's very hard to prove that she made criminal intent with unmasking some of these names.
"Let me be clear: I think that this stuff is illegal. There's another issue — how do you prove the illegality? I'm not a lawyer . . . but I think it just gets to be very, very difficult to make the compelling case.
"I think there's going to be a tremendous amount of damage that's going to be done to the intelligence community, and this is going to be another stain on the Obama administration and the politicization of the federal government to pursue their political ends."
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In an article published by Bloomberg on Monday, sources told reporter Eli Lake that White House lawyers discovered Rice, a security adviser to Obama, had asked for the names of people captured during surveillance in several incidents in connection with Trump's transition and campaign.
"The pattern of Rice's requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government's policy on 'unmasking' . . . individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally," Lake wrote. "Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like 'U.S. Person One.'"
Hoekstra said as the story unfolds, it will become clear as to "the number of intelligence reports and the amount of raw intelligence on the Trump transition team that made it into the Obama White House."
In addition, the amount of the number of people that were "unmasked" from the Trump transition team and "how often they were unmasked by Susan Rice," will also emerge, he told Malzberg.
"The reasonable person is going to look at that and say you know what, these guys were doing damning political intelligence on the Trump team before they got elected and then they monitored them after they became the transition team."
Hoekstra is the author of "Architects of Disaster: The Destruction of Libya," written with Teri Blumenfeld and published by The Calamo Press.
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