The NPR Politics Podcast - "Unmasking"

Episode Date: April 4, 2017

Plus the nuclear option and rumors the GOP healthcare effort may not be dead. This episode: host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, and political editor Domenico Montanaro, with NPR national security correspondent Mary Louise Kelly. More coverage at nprpolitics.org. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local pubilc radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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Okay, here's the show. It's the NPR Politics Podcast, here to talk about unmasking, some buzz on health care, and the latest on the nuclear option in the Senate. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. I'm Domenica Montanaro, political editor. And because we needed to call in the big guns on this one, NPR national security correspondent Mary Louise Kelly is here in the studio. Hello. Hello. Welcome, welcome.

Are you aware that you are big guns? I'm kissing my biceps as we speak. All right, Mary Louise, we brought you here to talk about a word we've been hearing a lot lately, particularly coming from President Trump and his allies. That word is unmasking. Mary Louise, what is unmasking? What is unmasking? Okay, so here's the scenario. When U.S. spy agencies are collecting information, trying to spy on foreign officials, say, hypothetically, for example, the Russian ambassador, they would be monitoring those calls. A transcript appears of those calls. And maybe a foreign official is calling an American official. So the American official, while not being targeted,

would be caught up in that monitoring. And that is what we call incidental collection. Incidental collection, the other buzz phrase of the day. So when that happens, you get this raw intelligence report, you get a transcript, and they black out the name of the American because they weren't supposed to be targeted, they weren't supposed to be caught up. And you will see if you look at the transcript, it is literally blacked out. And that person will be identified instead as, say, U.S. official one or U.S. person one. If there's a couple of them, U.S. Official 1 or U.S. Person 1. If there's a couple of them, U.S. Person 1, U.S. Person 2. So what happens when those raw intelligence reports go to, say, the White House, somebody at the National Security Council is reading it,

and they say, you know what, I need to know who that person is to understand how significant this is. Somebody with the appropriate security clearance can say, I need that person to be unmasked. I need to have their name revealed. Okay. So now that we know what it is, last month, President Trump turned to Twitter early one Saturday morning to accuse President Barack Obama of wiretapping him. Since then, there have been sort of a parade of people saying that that never actually happened. There was no wiretapping of Trump Tower. We have intelligence officials, the FBI director, members of Congress, including the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,

Devin Nunes, who all say no wiretapping. Absolutely no evidence of this whatsoever. But Nunes and people in the Trump orbit have started talking more and more about this idea of unmasking. Here he was on March 22nd. I have confirmed that additional names of Trump transition team members were unmasked. None of this surveillance was related to Russia or the investigation of Russian activities or of the Trump team. So we just got done saying that Devin Nunes and all these other people have said there was no wiretapping. However, Devin Nunes and some other people in the Trump orbit have been kind of splitting hairs here saying no wiretapping, but there was surveillance. Like that's the thing that they've been hammering on, right? Right. That's right. I mean, it's worth noting this is we're exactly one month today from that

morning when President Trump woke up before heading out for his golf game, started tweeting, saying President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower. They were spying on me. And so what you've had for a month has been this huge rush to say, OK, what is the evidence of that? And this is where Susan Rice enters the fray. And Susan Rice is the former national security advisor to President Obama. She's also this total conservative target. She is the person who, right after the attack on Benghazi, is the one who went out on all the shows and blamed a

video. And she has never been forgiven for that on the right. By conservative critics. Absolutely right. So here we are. She's been out of office since January, but reports out in the last couple of days put her smack in the center of this because she was in the White House as Obama's national security advisor during the Trump campaign and transition. And what the reports say is this, that Susan Rice asked for dozens of Trump aides, Trump associates to be unmasked. And this is being seized on as evidence that the Obama White House was, in fact, engaged in political spying against Trump. Susan Rice has come out and denied categorically that she was involved in political spying. She says, yes, I asked for some identities to be revealed.

That's what you do when you're the national security advisor administration officials receive intelligence briefings, sometimes containing unnamed Americans. This is what we had been talking about. If they've been swept up in incidental collection. And she used this example. Say the intelligence community had intercepted two foreigners talking about buying bomb making materials from an American seller. If that came to me as national security advisor, it would matter enormously. Is this some kook sitting in his living room communicating via the internet, offering to sell something he doesn't have?

Or is this a serious person or company or entity with the ability to provide that technology, perhaps to an adversary? That would be an example of a case where knowing who the U.S. person was was necessary to assess the information. So a huge distinction here, Tam, asking for somebody's identity to be unmasked versus then leaking that identity. And that's worth examining here. Susan Rice says, yes, I asked for identities to be unmasked. I never leaked it to anybody. I did not break the law. I went through proper channels. If she had, if there were political spying here, that would be a huge deal. Right. Well, and one more distinction to make

here. I mean, Susan Rice asked for this to be unmasked. Can the officials who do the unmasking, can they say, no, we don't think you need to know that? Sure. Although, I mean, she would have top secret clearances, the National Security Advisor. There There have to be an awfully good reason. But sure. So, I mean, the implication here politically from Republicans and conservatives is that Rice unmasked these folks, that she leaked it and had some political motivation to undermine the Trump campaign or the administration. That seems to go way too far. There's no evidence that she's leaked this information or that she was politically trying to undermine a campaign whatsoever. And I do think that that is kind of a big deal. And that's what she said today on MSNBC.

Did you seek the names of people involved in to unmask the names of people involved in the Trump transition, the Trump campaign, people surrounding the president-elect? That's Andrea Mitchell. Let me be clear. In order to spy on them, in order to expose them. Absolutely not for any political purposes to spy, expose anything. Did you leak the name of Mike Flynn? I leaked nothing to nobody and never have and never would. But let me explain. So two points off this. I leaked nothing to nobody and never have and never would. But let me explain.

So two points off this. I leaked nothing to nobody. Again, focusing here on the distinction, unmasking versus leaking. I mean, we assume that Trump's national security advisor, General McMasker, is as he reviews raw intelligence reports, may from time to time say, hey, I need to know who that person was. Unmask him. But drawing that kind of a bright line, while that may be good for her in the short run, all they need to do is find one phone call she'd ever made to a reporter and discuss some level of information that might not have otherwise been known. And suddenly you have another day or two life to the story and would undermine any of the kind of arguments she would be trying to make, obviously.

Bright line statements can come back to haunt you. And there are legitimate questions here. We don't know what caused Susan Rice to ask these people, these names to be unmasked. What was it that set off alarm bells for her? That's a really legitimate question. And she says she didn't share it with anybody. It's a reasonable question to ask and continue to look for that trail. And I don't think that we should

take everything that she says at face value any more than we would take what anybody else says at face value and say, oh, well, you know, she says she didn't do anything wrong. There is no evidence. But there is currently no evidence. And do you have any sense of how common is unmasking? How often will they say, you know, we really need this name uncovered as opposed to just letting it be? It's not an everyday thing. I mean, again, this is something that's happening behind the curtains. They don't tell the press when it happens. But, you know, I have talked to officials who will tell you that in, you know, years in the White House, they can count on their fingers the number of times that they have asked for this to

be done. What kind of information would there have to be in the kind of collection that is gathered for a national security advisor to say, you know what, I know that's an American there, but I need to know who that person is? Anything that sets off an alarm bell. And there's a proper channel. So again, hypothetical scenario, you could be sitting in the White House or in the Pentagon. You're a U.S. official. You have the appropriate security clearance. You say, I need to know who this person is. And you turn to your briefer. Sometimes the briefer is authorized to tell you who it is on the spot. Other times that request would go to the director of national intelligence. And then

that information would be given back to the one official who asked. You know, I think the bigger thing here, though, is to put this into some broader context politically. I mean, what has been happening over the past couple of weeks is confirmation that the FBI is investigating potential ties between the Trump campaign, Trump transition officials and various elements in Russia. Now, that is what's been going on with the drama on the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the FBI. And it is interesting timing that you suddenly see this kind of story come out, people finger pointing toward Susan Rice and unmasking, trying to move the story toward unmasking and leaks, as opposed to the substance of what could

be coming out of the Russia investigation. Right. Well, this is just, this is number one in Donald Trump's playbook, right, is when some sort of scandal seems to be rocking his presidency or was rocking his campaign. He is pretty good at pointing the finger and saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, look over there. I wrote about this a week or two ago. It's called whataboutism. Okay. Describe what is whataboutism. It's just like it sounds. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, you probably did it when you were a kid with your siblings. I did,

you know, like. Maybe I still do it. You know, your sibling kicks you and you get mad at them. They can say, well, you kicked me last week. You know, like, what about that time when you hurt me? So, therefore, you can't point the finger. And so when you bring this up to a national or international political level, what it does is it gives Donald Trump a couple of advantages. One is that it saves him from having to engage with the argument being made against him. Instead of giving a well-reasoned defense, he could just go on the offense and say, no, not engaging with that. Instead, what about that terrible thing you did?

Well, and I've certainly experienced that in the White House press briefing room where. I thought you were going to say at home. Well, also at home. But I've experienced this in the White House press briefing room where you ask the press secretary or someone else ask the press secretary, well, what about this thing with Michael Flynn?

And he says, but what about the leaks? Right. And I mean, the other thing is the unspoken principle underlying this is nobody's perfect. And therefore, one, you can't criticize me. And two, I have cover to do the things that I have done. Mary Louise, where does this go from here? And is the biggest story right now the unmasking or is the biggest story right now the investigation into Russian meded in the election, not saying they managed to definitively swing the result one way or the other, but they were in there meddling. How do we prevent this going forward? How does Europe prevent this as they have elections coming up?

So we're watching what happens in Europe. We're watching, of course, for any actual evidence to come out of the White House. Or elsewhere. Or elsewhere out of these allegations about surveillance during the campaign and the transition. And then, you know, the big one is as the investigations on the Hill and the FBI move forward, they're calling witnesses. That's starting, you know, around now. They are starting to interview people.

The Senate has aides out at CIA headquarters going through these fat binders of classified intelligence, looking at what's happening. I've got my eye, as everybody does, on Mike Flynn. Susan Rice's successor is national security advisor who, as we know, has offered to testify in exchange for immunity. Well, what's he got? What's the story he wants to tell? Yeah, his lawyer said he has a story to tell. So what kind of leverage does he have and what's he prepared to say? That's a very live question in Washington right now.

Well, I think we will have you back if we ever get the answer to that one or even if we don't. Mary Louise, thank you for schooling us. You're so welcome. I'm going to call Mike Flint's lawyer again now, if you'll excuse me. we will have you back if we ever get the answer to that one or even if we don't mary louise thank you for schooling us you're so welcome i'm gonna call mike flint's lawyer again now if you'll excuse me okay you get out of here we've got a little bit more to talk about but thank you for joining the pod happy podcasting bye see ya you know all this it's really funny all this kind of reminds me of do you remember the onion cover a few years ago that showed a guy in front of a big poster board with a bunch of redactions? And it said, FBI announces it finally realized it's been using black highlighter all these years. Okay. Before we go on, you heard the promo at the top of the show, but we want to mention it again.

NPR's daily morning news podcast premieres Wednesday. So maybe it's already out and it is in your feed right now as you hear this. It's called Up First. It's basically 10 minutes of morning news talk recorded at 5 a.m. so you know what happened overnight, posted by 6 a.m. It's hosted by Rachel Martin, David Green, and Steve Inskeep, though not always all at once. And it will feature some pretty frequent guest appearances from your favorite pod squad folks, including Scott Detrow, Susan Davis, and the one and only Domenico Montanaro. Have you set your alarm yet? I set my alarm. Let's hope it goes off.

I'm going to have to go to bed with the kids tonight because I've got to be here by 430. But, you know, it'll be a lot of fun, I think. I can't wait to hear it. Yeah, well, I'll be here so you don't have to be. Thank you, Domenico. OK, so, guys, make sure you download that weekday mornings from here on out. Now let's move on to another topic that is trending again here in Washington. Remember the Republican health care bill that a week and a half ago seemed totally dead or at least mostly dead? Well, guess what? It is now undead again. Kind of.

That was my rendition of The Walking Dead. Oh, is that what? But it's kind of undead in the way they're talking about it, but it's not really. Okay. It's in the proto-zombie stages. Like, it's not quite zombified yet. It's got the virus, but no limbs have fallen off yet. There's not quite zombified yet, but it's got the virus. But no limbs have fallen off. There's no virus even. They're just about making a zombie.

Right. So earlier today, Vice President Mike Pence was introducing the president at a CEO town hall. And he said this. The president and I remain confident that working with the Congress, we will repeal and replace Obamacare with health care reform that will work for the American people and work for the American economy. And of course, in the offing before we reach the end of the year, the president is determined to roll his sleeves up, work with the Congress and pass the largest tax reform in a generation. Of course, they have to say this. I mean, I hate to like, you know, be the political realist here. But like the fact of the matter is they're going home for Easter break in two weeks for April recess. There is no way that conservatives can go home. Conservatives

who for seven and a half years have been listening to Republicans say, just put us in charge and we will repeal and replace this thing you hate called Obamacare. They can't go home and say, eh, we've moved on to tax reform. Also, just a fact check here. If you do any kind of major tax reform, right, that is going to be the biggest in a generation, correct? Because like literally they have not done major tax reform since 1986. It's just a happy coincidence that they get to frame it that way. So by way of an update, an administration official tells me that Vice President Pence last night went to the House Freedom Caucus meeting at the Capitol. Those are the ones who had had been sort of refusing to vote for the previous version of the health care bill.

He also had moderate Republicans over to the White House yesterday to meet with him earlier in the day. Moderates, of course, if the Freedom Caucus gets what they want, moderates will peel off. And that's exactly what was happening. And that was a big part of why the thing failed before. All working toward maybe possibly reviving the health care bill. But Domenico, as you said, our colleague Susan Davis gathered some tape over in the halls of Congress today that sums this up beautifully. And remarkably, she found a Republican congressman, Steve Womack from Arkansas, to basically say what you just said, Domenico? Well, maybe it's the realization of what failing to execute our bill on health care actually does. It leaves everybody with Obamacare. We're on the eve of going home and spending two weeks with our constituents, or most members. I know I will, but most members are going

to go home and spend time with their constituents, and they know they're going to get questions about this. And for the people who were no, they'll have justification to deal with. And so if you are a Republican congressperson who is going home and might have a town hall, it's a lot easier to say, hey, yeah, we're working on it. We're talking than to say, ding dong, the witch is dead. Although, I mean, there are all sorts of other difficulties going along with this. And I don't really need to tell you guys that, but I'm going to anyway. Please do. As we saw with the AHCA, health care reform is, amazingly enough, super complicated, as we all learned in the last few months.

Or the last nine years. Well, yeah. And Obamacare has grown as Trump has been in office. Obamacare has grown in popularity. And there are parts of Obamacare that people really do like very much. So the challenge is, as it was with the AHCA, keeping those things that people do like and presenting a bill not just that isn't Obamacare, which may be enough to win some people over, but a bill that will actually leave people better off. The AHCA very much did not do that for many people. So the question will be, can you sell this beyond just saying, guys, it's not Obamacare?

And why that sales job is so difficult is summed up pretty much by something that one of our other Hill reporters, Scott Detrow, said. And since so many people listening think I sound like Scott, I'm not Scott. I'm Domenico. But don't tweet to Scott what I'm about to say, although Scott would be saying it. So Scott said that you can't get rid of something like pre-existing conditions, which is part of what this new bill that's been floated in discussions, getting rid of needing to cover pre-existing conditions, that makes no sense. Right.

Basically, it is saying, let's take one of the few things that most Americans agree was one of their favorite parts of the Affordable Care Act. Yeah, not going to happen. Before we go, there's a question that we have gotten a lot this week. It's about the coming Senate showdown on Neil Gorsuch and whether Senate Republicans will change the rules to require only a 51 vote majority to confirm him to the Supreme Court. The question is, this week we heard so many senators speak with regret about the fact that it's come to this. So after they change the rules to confirm Neil Gorsuch, can't they just change them back? That's

what our listeners want to know. Yes. All right. I'm going to address this two ways, because first, yes, they could change it back, but they would have to, again, take another clean vote to say by majority rule, we actually want to put the filibuster back. We want to put it back to 60 votes. They could put it to 67 votes like it used to be two thirds majority. The reality is if Republicans are in charge and they change the rule to be 50 plus one, 51 votes, then they would want to keep it at 51 so they could get through whatever they want. If that rule is gone and Democrats suddenly take over, do you think Democrats are suddenly going to turn around and go, you know what, let's make it harder

for us to get the stuff we want to get done through. Probably not unless there becomes a full-scale opposition from the American people to say bring back the filibuster. Oh, I can imagine the signs now. So we're stuck with this is what you're saying. Should this be done, we would be stuck with it. Well, it's sort of a perverse thing where it just keeps building on itself. You don't put the genie back. I don't know.

Correct. The toothpaste is out of the tube. If it happens, it feels like it's a tough thing to go back on. We will be watching that showdown in the Senate later this week. And if a rules change happens, it will likely be on Thursday, which means we will talk about it on our Thursday roundup, which will be in your feed sometime on Thursday. There will be so much to talk about the Senate showdown over Neil Gorsuch and Chinese President Xi Jinping visiting President Trump at Mar-a-Lago. You can keep up with all of our political coverage at NPR.org on the NPR One app and on your local public radio station. And

don't forget to support your local public radio station. And don't forget to support your local public radio station. That is the best way to support the work we do here on the podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And of course, thank you to Mary Louise Kelly for joining us earlier. And thanks to all of you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.