Eli Lake, Columnist

Top Obama Adviser Sought Names of Trump Associates in Intel

Investigators saw a pattern behind requests from Susan Rice.

Investigators saw a pattern behind requests from Susan Rice.

Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
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White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The pattern of Rice's requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government's policy on "unmasking" the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like "U.S. Person One."