Former national security adviser Susan Rice committed a "monumental abuse of power" in unmasking the names of American citizens included in intelligence reports last year, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said Wednesday.
"Abuses of power are offenses against the public trust," McCarthy said in a column for National Review. "They often overlap with a criminal offense, but they are not the same thing as a criminal offense."
Rice admitted Tuesday that she had unmasked the names of several Trump campaign associates included in intelligence data that had been collected incidentally — though she said it was done "not for any political purposes."
She also said that she did not leak any names to the news media, telling Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC that "I leaked nothing to nobody."
Rice's "current stress on the lawfulness of the intelligence collection is a straw man," McCarthy said Wednesday, because the data were gathered under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and at former President Barack Obama's direction.
"The technical legality of any particular instance of unmasking is beside the point," he continued. "The question is abuse of power."
Therefore, "contrary to Susan Rice's latest version of events," her actions have "little or nothing to do with whether laws were broken," McCarthy concluded.
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