Eli Lake, Columnist

What We Still Don't Know About Obama-Era 'Unmasking'

Who requested that U.S. citizens' names be revealed, and how often, and why? Most importantly: Was it business as usual?

September 20, 2017 at 9:30 AM UTC

By Eli Lake

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Susan Rice requested names of U.S. citizens who were incidentally surveilled. But whether that's inappropriate is not yet clear.
Photographer: Pete Souza/The White House, via Getty Images

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Like most Washington scandals, the frenzy over a senior Obama adviser unmasking identities of Trump officials is larger and smaller than both sides imagine.

President Donald Trump and his supporters say the former national security adviser, Susan Rice, engaged in domestic political spying when she asked for the identities of Trump transition officials caught up in surveillance of foreign targets. (In March, Trump accused his predecessor on Twitter of illegally wiretapping Trump Tower, and he has since said the Rice story confirmed his initial tweet. It didn't.)