Susan Rice’s Revealing Twitter Account - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Susan Rice’s Revealing Twitter Account
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Susan Rice’s Twitter account is one of many windows on her partisanship. Even in the midst of an investigation into her political espionage, she can’t resist a few feverish re-tweets. The most remarkable one came on Thursday. It was a re-tweet of a reckless column by E.J. Dionne that seeks to revive, sans evidence, the fable of Trump-Russia collusion in last year’s election.

It is clear from this re-tweet that Rice remains proud of the Obama administration’s spying on Trump and his aides. Notice that the dispute has shifted from whether spying occurred to why it occurred. Both sides say it happened. The difference is that the Dems applaud the spying and the Republicans condemn it.

Recall the evasive denial of Obama after Trump’s initial tweet. Obama never denied the surveillance. He just denied ordering it. Shortly thereafter, one of his speechwriters, Jon Favreau, punctuated this distinction: “I’d be careful about reporting that Obama said there was no wiretapping. Statement just said that neither he nor the WH ordered it.”

Of course, that too was a falsehood, predicated on, at best, an exceedingly narrow definition of the “White House.” In fact, the White House in any honest sense of the term — from John Brennan to Loretta Lynch to Susan Rice — did order it. These White House officials acted in Obama’s name and with his knowledge. Or are we supposed to believe that he was wholly unaware of a months-long investigation (which ran on multiple tracks, from the FBI investigation to a multi-agency investigation launched by Brennan) into the opposing party’s presidential nominee?

Susan Rice has said that she needed to spy on Trump and his aides in order to conduct responsible briefings, which invites the question (that MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell studiously avoiding asking her): Who exactly was she briefing at the White House? The janitors? Obviously, she was briefing the president. In other words, Obama knew everything from the unmasked info that she did.

To press flunkies, Susan Rice casts her espionage as high-minded, national-security-based vigilance. But on her Twitter account she doesn’t bother to keep up that charade. That she would re-tweet the partisan hackery of E.J. Dionne indicates the depth of partisanship behind her espionage.

Dionne’s column is based on blatant question-begging, treating as an outrage that “We are not talking much about whether Russia colluded with Trump’s campaign to help elect him.” Look at the absurd shading of that statement, as if people are obligated to talk about something that hasn’t been established.

Dionne peppers the rest of his column with dark references to the Russia “story,” without telling us what the story is. Trump’s greatest achievement, he ludicrously argues, is his ability to “keep the Russia story at bay.” Again, what story? How do you keep something that doesn’t exist at bay?

In this Orwellian vein, Dionne thunders about the “core Trump principle: A lie is as good as the truth as long as you can get your base to believe it. And sure enough, the new Post-ABC News poll conducted last week found that 52 percent of Republicans believe that ‘the Obama administration intentionally spied on Trump and members of his campaign during the 2016 election campaign.’”

How is that a lie? And why would they need to “believe” something that has already been confirmed? No matter what weasel word is used (“unmasking,” etc.), the Obama administration did spy on Trump and his people. The Dionne principle is: A lie is as good as the truth as long as you can get Jeff Bezos to pay for it and Susan Rice to re-tweet it.

And no Dionne column is complete without reference to all the right people who swallow the media’s regnant propaganda: “Thoughtful souls, conservatives as well as liberals, saw something terribly off about Trump swinging so wildly and with such indifference to verifiable fact.” He concludes the column with a final note of question-begging: “Every day he can postpone his reckoning with Russia is a victory.” What reckoning? How do you postpone an event that doesn’t exist.

To paraphrase Dionne, thoughtful logicians see something terribly off in his Op-Ed. But Susan Rice obviously found it all very impressive and re-tweeted it — a sign that her coming defense will rest upon cleaving to the collusion claim.

Meanwhile, the Democrats, whose silence about Obamagate speaks volumes, have shown no interest in examining the “unmasked” information collected by Rice, even though they had complained bitterly about the Republicans “not sharing it with them” earlier. It turns out that most of the House Intel Dems don’t want to see Rice’s activity, lest that complicate their stance, according to the Daily Caller:

Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes is the only Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence other than Rep. Adam Schiff, the panel’s ranking minority member, to review intelligence files showing former White House National Security Adviser Susan Rice “unmasked” aides to President Donald Trump during his transition to the Oval Office, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has learned.

The apparent lack of interest among the remaining seven Democrats on the intelligence panel is in striking contrast to their earlier vocal demands that they see the documents after committee chairman Rep. Devin Nunes disclosed he had read them at the White House complex.

According to a source with knowledge of congressional visits to the National Security Agency, the classified documents have been available to committee members for three weeks, but Himes and Schiff are the lone Democrats to review them.

The Democrats are at once proud of the spying and hesitant to know its details. Schiff, normally so talkative, has turned taciturn after seeing them, relying on his legal training to avoid difficult questions. That is easy enough to pull off since the media, composed almost entirely of Democrats, is reluctant to put him on the spot. They just nod, Andrea Mitchell-style, at his parsing and move on.

There was once a time when the Dionne’s would approvingly quote Michael Kinsley’s dictum that “the scandal in Washington is not what’s illegal but what’s legal.” They don’t quote that anymore. Now they lecture people on the merits of “legal surveillance” and instruct the public that “unmasking is not spying” and so forth. And since the target of it all was the odious Donald Trump, who cares anyways? It is that attitude which the Susan Rices trust will save them from scrutiny.

This is why she can let it all hang out on Twitter. And she is not alone. Ned Price, another Obamaland partisan hack who worked at the CIA and NSC, recently re-tweeted the conspiracy theory that Jason Chaffetz is quitting Congress due to Russian blackmail.

How did Obamagate happen? Look no further than these twits and tweets.

George Neumayr
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George Neumayr, a senior editor at The American Spectator, is author most recently of The Biden Deception: Moderate, Opportunist, or the Democrats' Crypto-Socialist?
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