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The Washington Post's Bob Woodward warned on Wednesday that there are people from the Obama administration who could be facing criminal charges for unmasking the names of Trump transition team members from surveillance of foreign officials.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said earlier that he had briefed Trump on new information, unrelated to an investigation into Russian activities, that suggested that several members of Trump's transition team and perhaps Trump himself had their identities "unmasked" after their communications were intercepted by U.S. intelligence officials.

The revelation is notable because identities of Americans are generally supposed to remain "masked" if American communications are swept up during surveillance of foreign individuals.

During an interview on Fox News, Woodward said that if that information about the unmasking is true, "it is a gross violation."

He said it isn't Trump's assertion, without proof, that his predecessor wiretapped Trump Tower that is of concern, but rather that intelligence officials named the Americans being discussed in intercepted communications.

"You can learn all kinds of things from diplomats gossiping, because that's what occurs. Under the rules, and they are pretty strict, it's called minimization. You don't name the American person who is being discussed," Woodward said.

He noted that there are about 20 people in the intelligence community who, for intelligence reasons, can order this "minimization" be removed.

"But the idea that there was intelligence value here is really thin," Woodward said. "It's, again, down the middle, it is not what Trump said, but this could be criminal on the part of people who decided, oh, let's name these people."

He drove the point home, adding that "under the rules, that name is supposed to be blanked out, and so you've got a real serious problem potentially of people in the Obama administration passing around this highly classified gossip."

Also from the Washington Examiner

Rep. Thomas Massie believes the consequences of passing the American Health Care Act on Thursday could be catastrophic for the Republican Party and the process used to come up with the bill embarrasses him.

Massie said on MSNBC Thursday he believes the GOP replacement for the Affordable Care Act is a giveaway to insurance companies and won't actually make health insurance cheaper or healthcare better.

"The consequences of passing it and signing it are much worse for the Republican Party than the consequences of it going down today, and I hope it goes down today," Massie said.

Massie said the plan replaces mandates, subsidies and penalties paid to the government with mandates, subsidies and penalties paid to insurance

03/23/17 8:58 AM

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Bob Woodward: Obama officials possibly facing criminal charges for unmasking scheme - Washington Examiner

House Intelligence Committee Ranking MemberAdam Schiff is in high dudgeonover the bad form of House Intelligence Chairman DevinNunes in reporting his bombshell -- that the chairmanhad been shown actual surveillance(not involving Russia)of the Trump transition team and possibly of the then president-elect himself -- to President Trump before he presented the evidence to the committee.

Bad form, quite possibly. But so what?

The facts are what they are.

What appears at this writing is thatTrump transition team members and possibly Trump himself had their identities revealed, were"unmasked" in the parlance, while foreign diplomats were being surveilled.The identitiesof American citizens werenot sufficiently "minimized," as they arerequired to be by law.This is a crime one would assume wouldput the perpetrators in prison. So far it hasn't. More than that, such behavior isa grave threat to a free society, to all of us.

In effect, Trump was wiretapped -- if not in the corny, old sense of the word, something very close. Technologically, he was wiretapped, as were several(actually many) others.

A fair amountofthis happened not long beforeBarack Obamasuddenlychanged the rules regarding raw intelligence, for the first timeeverallowing the NSA to share its data with 16 other intelligence agencies, thus making thedissemination of said data (i. e. leaking) many times more likely.That was done on January 12, 2017, just three scant days before Trump's inauguration. Why did the then president finally decideto make that particularchangeat that extremely late date, rather than on one of the previous seven years and three hundred fifty-three days of his presidency? You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes or Watson to smell a rat. Something's rottensomewhere -- and it's not Denmark.

Whether Barack Obama ordered the surveillance of Donald Trump during the transition is not the question. He would never have had to. In fact, he would have beenhighly unlikely to have done so for obvious legal and practical/political reasons. Instead, supporters of the thenpresident in a position to authorize or activate such surveillance would normally know or assume his wishesanywaywithout having to be told and could act accordingly.

That is the way of the world since there was a world.

The operative question is whether these recorded conversations then ever wound up on Obama's desk or whether he knew about themin some other manner... and, if so, when.If the worst istrue, itis a scandal that makesWatergate seem like a child's prank. Even Watergate's own Bob Woodward seemed to acknowledge as much on The O'Reilly Factor on Wednesday night.

This is why any legitimate investigation by a congressional committee or anyone else must encompass both Obama and Trump. This is a two-part story. If both parties are not investigated -- they cannot be separated -- this is no more than a partisan show. Further, the press cannot even faintly be trusted to investigate or adjudicatethis matter. Their bias is so overwhelming it would sink the Titanic twice.

See more here:
Time to Investigate Obama, not Just Trump - PJ Media

We checked a statement by House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif.

In his opening statement at a closely watched hearing about possible Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election, House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., criticized United States policy toward Russia under President Barack Obama.

"In recent years, committee members have issued repeated and forceful pleas for stronger actions against Russian belligerence, but the Obama administration was committed to the notion, against all evidence, that we could reset relations with Putin," Nunes said.

This description of the Obama administrations position struck us as one-sided, so we took a closer look. We asked Nunes's office for comment, but didn't hear back.

We concludedits misleading for Nunes to have ignored at least three years of the Obama administration in which the reset policy was dead, replaced by a much tougher line on Moscow.

How the reset came about

In March 2009, about two months after Obama was sworn in, his administration initiated a new policy toward Russia called the "reset." The official kickoff came in Geneva on March 6, 2009, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov a red button.

The new policy came less than a year after conflict flared in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two regions of Georgia, an independent country that was previously part of the Soviet Union. Obamas foreign policy team had decided that the United States had a window of opportunity to find common ground on certain issues with Russia, given that Dmitry Medvedev had replaced Vladimir Putin as president in mid 2008.

The administration -- and some outside observers -- credit the reset with some achievements, at least initially.

During the period when the reset was U.S. policy, the two nations signed a nuclear-arms treaty; reached an agreement to allow U.S. troops and weapons destined for Afghanistan to be sent through Russian territory rather than Pakistan; collaborated on tough United Nations sanctions against Iran; achieved Russian membership in the World Trade Organization; and agreed that Russia would not use a U.N. Security Council veto to block a bombing campaign in Libya by the United States and its European allies.

As time went on, though, the reset drew increasing criticism. In 2011, former chess champion and human-rights activist Garry Kasparov criticized both Obama and Putin, telling the Daily Beast that the reset was "a disaster." And Douglas J. Feith, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy during the George W. Bush administration, co-wrote an article in Foreign Policy that called the reset "a head-shaking disappointment."

The reset peters out

The era of cooperation began to come apart in 2012 -- not coincidentally, the year Putin returned to the presidency after Medvedevs term.

Large street protests in his 2012 presidential campaign "had unnerved Mr. Putin, and he accused Mrs. Clinton of instigating them," the New York Times reported. "White House officials had hoped the hostile talk was just for domestic campaign purposes, but even after Mr. Putin formally won re-election, he kept it up."

Relations worsened further in 2013, when Russia took in Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who had leaked a large trove of sensitive intelligence.

The last straw, however, came in 2014 with Russias intervention in Ukraine. A popular revolution overthrew pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine, another former Soviet republic that became independent after the end of the Cold War. Russia responded by applying military pressure in pro-Russian regions of Ukraine and eventually annexing Crimea.

In addition to strongly condemning Russias actions, the United States worked with its European allies to impose a series of escalating sanctions on Moscow starting on March 6, 2014.

The sanctions "inflicted real costs on Russia," said Dan Nexon, a Georgetown University foreign service professor.

Emma Ashford, a research fellow with expertise on Russia at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that while the reset was "dying" between 2012 and 2014, the sanctions were a turning point.

"By 2014, with turmoil in Ukraine and the Russian invasion of Crimea, there was no longer any real attempt to seek the reset," she said. "In fact, the Obama administration pursued a strong sanctions policy against Russia, and contributed troops to bolster NATO forces in Eastern Europe."

Other experts agreed.

"Certainly by March 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, there was no evidence of any ongoing Obama administration commitment to the reset," added Susan H. Allen, a foreign policy specialist at George Mason University. "The U.S. condemnation of the annexation of Crimea was clear and unequivocal."

"By 2014, I don't know how anyone could credibly argue that U.S. policy was the reset policy," added Richard Nephew, a research scholar at Columbia University.

Our ruling

Nunes said, "In recent years ... the Obama administration was committed to the notion, against all evidence, that we could reset relations with Putin."

Nunes summary of U.S. policy toward Russia is at best incomplete. The Obama administration did pursue a reset policy, and kept it up arguably as late as 2014. But observers agree that the policy was dead no later than early 2014, when Russia intervened in Ukraine, and was already in question for two years before that.

Nunes statement is misleadingly oversimplified, so we rate it Half True.

Originally posted here:
Devin Nunes oversimplifies timeline of Obama 'reset' with Russia - PolitiFact

New York Times

Opposition and a Shave: Former Obama Aides Counter Trump New York Times They were co-authors of Mr. Obama's 2011 speech at the White House Correspondents Association dinner that lampooned Mr. Trump so harshly that it helped form his decision to make a real presidential bid, I'll-show-'em style. (The speech depicted him as ...

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Opposition and a Shave: Former Obama Aides Counter Trump - New York Times

Alyssa Mastromonaco, a former White House aide to President Obama, criticized President Trumps repeated allegations that Mr. Obama had ordered a wiretap surveillance of Trump Tower.

Former White House deputy chief of staff of operations Alyssa Mastromonaco.

CBS News

On CBS This Morning Monday, co-anchor Charlie Rose asked how angry President Obama was about Mr. Trumps allegations of wiretapping.

I dont know how angry he is, Mastromonaco said. I know the rest of us were pretty pissed.

Because? Because its insane. Because its an insane accusation. And its an insane accusation for a president to accuse another president of, and also for anyone who knows Barack Obama. He wouldnt do that.

She also described the turmoil of the Trump administrations first two months in office as pretty uncommon. The first 100 days, youre always trying to get your bearings, and it seems that anything that existed before them, theyre just shooting down for sport, whether its protocol or bills.

Mastromonaco, who served as deputy chief of staff of operations for Obama -- the youngest woman ever to do so -- acknowledged that she preferred a behind the scenes role, rather than to appear on camera.

I had never been a person who was out there, she said, recalling her interview years earlier with Charlie Rose. I didnt think that my job was to be on camera. It was to be running things. And there are people who should be out there and people running things, and I decided just to stay behind the scenes.

Twelve

Her new book is called Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House (Twelve).

Co-anchor Gayle King asked, You talk about being a woman in the old boys club and how at times it was intimidating, but other times you said, Oh, no, Im going to show people how its done here. Not in an arrogant way, but you were very confident.

I was, Mastromonaco replied. Well, I knew what I knew, and I think thats one of my strengths. I know what I know, and I know what I dont know. So if we were talking about going on a foreign trip and the National Security Council wanted to put in an extra couple of stops, I was like, No, were not going to do that. And when it came to the president, [he] was so wonderful about also understanding peoples strengths and weaknesses and knowing that, if I said that, Alyssa is probably right.

At one time he said, Remember your words have power.

He did. That had never actually occurred to me. I was very upset about something someone had said to a reporter, and I wrote a sort of unhinged e-mail to the entire senior staff. I was like, We should have each others backs, so I was very upset. I thought everyone would ignore it, but someone told the president about it, and he felt the need to talk to me about the strength of my words.

The books title comes from Mr. Obama, Mastromonaco said. Because if he was on the road and you got an e-mail that said, Who thought this was a good idea? -- which was not uncommon -- you knew that he knew you thought it was a good idea, and he wanted you to just own your decision, which I always did. It was my idea.

She told CBS This Morning that her goal was to get women more interested and excited about government.

I think that this book, hopefully, makes government a little bit more relatable, a little bit less scary, she said. Really, if you have the passion and commitment, you can do it. You dont have to be Harvard-educated with a dad who was a congressman to work in the White House.

Mastromonaco said the book underwent many iterations. I actually had a much harder time -- when I was trying to be a little bit more lofty. I struggled. I ended up on Zoloft trying to do it.

She then got advice from a friend, comedian Mindy Kaling. She said, Write one essay for every chapter and it will come. So I wrote one essay per chapter, and I got a cowriter who understood me, Lauren Oyler, and she totally pulled the great stuff out of me. And we realized this is exactly the book we wanted.

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Former Obama aide: Trump's wiretap claim is "insane" - CBS News