"By the book!"

Andrew McCarthy writes in National Review,

On her way out the White House door and out of her job as national-security adviser, Susan Rice writes an email-to-self. Except it’s not really an email-to-self. It is quite consciously an email for the record.

...An email written on January 21 to record decisions made on January 5 is not written to memorialize what was decided. It is written to revise the memory of what was decided in order to rationalize what was then done.

January 5 was the day President Obama was presented with the ballyhooed report he had ordered to be rushed to completion by multiple intelligence agencies before his administration ended, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.” The briefing that day was conducted by four intelligence-community leaders: James Comey, Michael Rogers, John Brennan, and James Clapper, directors respectively of the FBI, NSA, CIA and the Office of the National Intelligence Director.

Just as significant: January 5 was the day before these same intelligence-community leaders would brief President-elect Trump on the same report.

Also on hand at the January 5 White House briefing were Vice President Joe Biden and acting Attorney General Sally Yates. According to Rice, immediately after the briefing, President Obama had his two top law-enforcement officials, Yates and Comey, linger for “a brief follow-on conversation” with the administration’s political leadership: Obama, Biden, and Rice.

...Rice’s “by the book” bunkum is transparent: Obama officials claimed to adhere to a book that forbade consultations between political leaders and investigators. But here they were consulting. So Rice tried to cover the tracks in her email: She revises history such that the consultation morphs into a mere friendly reminder that Obama wanted everything done by the book. He was certainly “not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective,” no siree.

We might counter that people who have lived “by the book” for eight years would not have to remind each other to go “by the book.” It would go without saying.

...That is what Rice’s email is really about: not sharing with the incoming Trump administration classified information about the Trump-Russia investigation, such as the basis for seeking a FISA warrant on Carter Page.

...The investigation was about suspected Kremlin complicity with Trump; it was about the possibility that an adversary regime was in a position to blackmail the president of the United States. It was never about Carter Page.

...the challenge for Obama’s team was to keep the investigation going even after Trump took office.

Since Trump would have the power to shut down the investigation, the trick was to avoid making him feel threatened by it. Therefore, the strategy was to withhold information that illustrated Trump’s centrality to the investigation, assure him that he was not a suspect, and gently admonish him about the need to respect law enforcement’s independence (on pain of being accused of obstruction).

...The real objective of investigating Page and Manafort was to uncover corrupt ties — if there were any — between Russia and Trump.

...To tell Trump he was not under investigation was misleading. Just like Susan Rice’s email was misleading. The plan forged by top Obama political and law-enforcement officials was to pursue an investigation of President Trump without sharing the full details of the investigation. They made a plan: Give Trump just a sliver of what the probe is about, tell him he is not under investigation, and keep investigating him under the guise of investigating Page, Manafort, and the Steele dossier.

It is getting close to two years with no apparent evidence of an actionable Trump–Russia conspiracy. Nevertheless, it is still necessary to ask: Is President Trump under investigation for collusion with the Kremlin? If not, shouldn’t he and the country be told that?

And since counterintelligence investigations are conducted to inform the president — the constitutional officer responsible for national security against foreign threats — it is worth asking: What was the difference between what the FBI told the FISA court about the Trump–Russia investigation and what they told the president of the United States about it?

Read more here.