Susan Rice

Susan Rice

Photo from Wikimedia Commons / Author of Photo: Chuck Kennedy/White House

Overview

* Foreign-policy aide to Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988
* Served on the National Security Council for the Clinton administration
* Former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution
* Foreign-policy advisor to Democratic candidate John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign
* Was nominated in 2008 by President-elect Barack Obama to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
* Infamously claimed, falsely, that the deadly 9/11/12 terrorist attack against an American diplomatic mission in Benghazi was a “spontaneous” response to “a hateful and offensive [anti-Muslim] video”
* Was appointed as President Obama’s top national security adviser in 2013
* Was named Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council by President-elect Biden in December 2020


Background, and the Origins of Rice’s View of America As a Racist Nation

Born on November 17, 1964 in Washington, D.C., Susan Elizabeth Rice graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1986. That same year, she wrote an 86-page book titled A History Deferred, which claimed that because most U.S. students were “taught American history, literature, art, drama, and music largely from a white, western European perspective,” “their grasp of the truth, of reality, is tainted by a myopia of sorts.” “The greatest evil in omitting or misrepresenting Black history, literature, and culture in elementary or secondary education is the unmistakable message it sends to the black child,” Rice elaborated. “The message is ‘your history, your culture, your language and your literature are insignificant. And so are you.’” Published by the Black Student Fund — an advocacy group for which Rice interned — A History Deferred served as a guide for elementary- and secondary-school teachers who aspired to teach “Black Studies” from an Afrocentric perspective.

Rice’s Education & the Launch of Her Political Career

In 1985 Rice was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and subsequently attended New College, Oxford, where she earned a master’s degree in philosophy in 1988 and a Ph.D. in the same discipline two years later.

During the 1988 presidential campaign, Rice served as a foreign-policy aide to Democrat candidate Michael Dukakis.

Support for Zimbabwean Dictator Robert Mugabe

While at Oxford in 1990, Rice wrote a 426-page dissertation praising, as “a model and a masterpiece in the evolution of international peacekeeping,” the 1979-80 British peacekeeping operation that had led to the political ascendancy of Zimbabwe’s Marxist dictator, Robert Mugabe. In her dissertation, Rice lauded Mugabe as a “pragmatic, intelligent, sensible, gentle, balanced man” who possessed considerable “patience and restraint.”

Rice Works for Consulting Firm

In the early 1990s Rice was a management consultant for McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm.

Rice Joins the Clinton Administration

From 1993-97, Rice served on the National Security Council for the Bill Clinton administration. From 1993-95 she was also the administration’s director for international organizations and peacekeeping, and from 1995-97 she was both Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs. Rice’s political mentor during these years was Secretary of State Madeline Albright.

From 1997-2001, Rice served as the Clinton administration’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs.

A 2012 American Spectator analysis of Rice’s career in government lays bare her consistent failure to perceive political dangers on the horizon:

“[Rice] epitomized the quietism of 1990s foreign policy. There is no record of her viewing with alarm the signs of things to come: neither the civil war in Algeria pitting jihadists against a military regime, nor the forebodings of jihadi-linked terrorism in Sudan, Kenya, or Somalia, nor the encroaching disaster in ex-Southern Rhodesia, which, renamed Zimbabwe and ruled by the despot Robert Mugabe, was well on its way to the catatonic dictatorship into which it has fully evolved, or rather descended.”

Rice Downplays the Rwandan Genocide for Political Reasons

During the Rwandan genocide of mid-1994 — in which some 800,000 people were massacred in a 100-day period — Rice was a key player in the Clinton administration’s decision not to intervene in a peacekeeping role, so as to avoid becoming embroiled in a politically risky endeavor where no strategic U.S. interests were in play. (Classified documents prove conclusively that Rice and her fellow Clinton administration officials were — contrary to claims they made soon after the period of mass slaughter in Rwanda — fully aware of how extensive the Rwandan carnage was.)

In a related measure, Rice persuaded the administration to purge the State Department’s and CIA’s Rwanda-related memos of such terms as “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” “If we use the word ‘genocide‘ and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November congressional election?” she wondered aloud. Then-lieutenant colonel Tony Marley would later recall that he and his colleagues at the State Department “could believe that people would wonder that, but not that they would actually voice it.” In 2001 Rice claimed not to remember having posed the question seven years earlier, but conceded that “if I said it, it was completely inappropriate, as well as irrelevant.”

Rice Rejects Sudan’s Offers to Turn Over Osama bin Laden in 1997 & 1998

In 1996-98, Rice helped persuade President Clinton to rebuff Sudan’s offer to turn Osama bin Laden, who was living there at the time, over to U.S. authorities. Rice reasoned that because Sudan had a poor human-rights record, the U.S. should have no dealings with that nation’s government — not even to obtain custody of the al Qaeda leader or to receive intelligence information on terrorists from Sudanese authorities. She viewed such intelligence as inherently untrustworthy. Richard Miniter, author of the 2013 book Losing bin Ladenexplains what happened:

“The FBI, in 1996 and 1997, had their efforts to look at terrorism data and deal with the bin Laden issue overruled every single time by the State Department, by Susan Rice and her cronies, who were hell-bent on destroying the Sudan … Rice [cited] the suffering of Christians [in Sudan] as one reason that she doubted the integrity of the Sudanese offers. But her analysis largely overlooked the view of U.S. Ambassador to Sudan [1995-97] Tim Carney, who argued for calling Khartoum’s bluff.”

As Carney said in a 2002 Washington Post op-ed that he co-authored with Mansoor Ijaz:

“Sudan’s policy shift sparked a debate at the State Department, where foreign service officers believed the United States should reengage Khartoum. By the end of summer 1997, [those officers] persuaded incoming Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to let at least some diplomatic staff return to Sudan to press for a resolution of the civil war and pursue offers to cooperate on terrorism. Two individuals, however, disagreed. NSC terrorism specialist Richard Clarke and NSC Africa specialist Susan Rice, who was about to become assistant secretary of State for African affairs.”

Rice and Clarke persuaded Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger to overrule Albright vis-a-vis Sudan. When Sudan tried again to share intelligence on bin Laden in a February 1998 letter addressed directly to Middle East and North Africa special agent-in-charge David Williams, Rice still wanted nothing to do with Sudan and killed any possibility of a deal.

Bin Laden subsequently moved his terrorist operations to Afghanistan, from where he would go on to mastermind the murderous 9/11 attacks of 2001.

Rice Lies about Security at U.S. Embassy in Kenya

Rice’s actions in the wake of two terrorist attacks against American interests in 1998 are highly noteworthy. In the spring of that year, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, sent an urgent letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright begging for additional security at the embassy, in light of growing terrorist threats and a warning that she (Bushnell) herself was the target of an assassination plot. The State Department denied this request, as well as a number of previous ones, on grounds that beefed-up security measures would be too costly. A few months later, on August 7, 1998, Islamic terrorists simultaneously blew up the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania with car bombs, killing more than 200 people. Within 24 hours, Rice appeared on PBS as a Clinton administration spokesperson and falsely claimed that the administration had “maintain[ed] a high degree of security at all of our embassies at all times.” In addition, she stated that there had been “no telephone warning or call of any sort like that, that might have alerted either embassy just prior to the blast.”

Rice’s Diplomatic Disaster Involving Ethiopia and Eritrea (1998)

In May 1998, Rice was dispatched to mediate a peace plan between the warring African nations of Ethiopia and Eritrea. According to Columbia University professor Peter Rosenblum: “What is publicly known is that Rice announced the terms of a plan agreed to by Ethiopia, suggesting that Eritrea would have to accept it, before [Eritrean President] Isaias had given his approval. He responded angrily, rejecting the plan and heaping abuse on Rice. Soon afterward, Ethiopia bombed the capital of Eritrea, and Eritrea dropped cluster bombs on Ethiopia…. Susan Rice was summoned back to Washington in early June after the negotiations collapsed. Insiders agree that the secretary of state [Madeleine Albright] was furious. According to one, Rice was essentially ‘put on probation,’ kept in Washington where the secretary could keep an eye on her. ‘Susan had misread the situation completely,’ according to one State Department insider who observed the conflict with Albright.”

As Bret Stephens later wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “An estimated 100,000 people would perish in the war that Ms. Rice so ineptly failed to end. And the leaders in whom she invested her faith would all become typical African strongmen, with [terrible] human-rights records to match.”

Rice’s Diplomatic Disaster Involving Sierra Leone (1999)

Fred Fleitz of National Review Online discusses how “Rice also played a central role in an absurd and deadly peace plan in Sierra Leone that released a psychotic rebel leader named Foday Sankoh from prison and made him Sierra Leone’s vice president under the Lome Agreement of 1999.” As Fleitz elaborates: “Sankoh’s rebel group, the RUF, which had a reputation for mass rapes and amputations, was given amnesty for all crimes. The agreement resulted in a catastrophe because Sankoh immediately began to reorganize his rebel force after he was released from prison and his fighters resumed killing and maiming civilians. The RUF refused to allow a U.N. peacekeeping force into rebel-held areas and took 500 peacekeepers hostage. The Clinton administration was afraid to resolve the disaster, so the U.N. turned to the United Kingdom, the former colonial power. British troops routed the RUF and arrested Sankoh.”

Susan Rice & Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda

After leaving the Clinton administration in 2001, Rice became managing director at Intellibridge, a D.C.-based strategic-analysis firm where one of her clients was Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda.

Joining the Brookings Institution

In 2002 Rice became a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy and Global Economy & Development programs.

Mischaracterizing the Clinton Administration’s Responses to Terrorism

In a 2003 speech, Rice acknowledged that America’s war on terror had gotten “underway well before 9/11,” by which time the U.S. had already been “attacked many other times in many places — New York in 1993, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Yemen to name just a few.” Nonetheless, she maintained that President Clinton’s tepid responses to those attacks — “militarily and through other means” — had been sufficient.

Advisor to John Kerry (2004)

During the 2004 presidential campaign, Rice was a foreign-policy advisor to Democratic candidate John Kerry. According to Ed Lasky in American Thinker:

“One of the major steps Kerry suggested for dealing with the Middle East was to appoint James Baker and Jimmy Carter as negotiators. When furor erupted at the prospect of two of the most ardent foes of Israel being suggested to basically ride ‘roughshod’ over Israel, Kerry backtracked and blamed his staff for the idea. His staff was Susan Rice.”

Depicting Terrorism As a Response to Poverty & Oppression

In 2005 Rice co-authored an academic article which postulated that terrorism was “a threat borne of both oppression and deprivation.”

Advocating American Intervention in Africa

Rice also called for the use of American military power to intervene — as part of a large, well-funded United Nations peacekeeping force — directly in African conflicts such as the one in the Darfur region of Sudan. Advocating the imposition of a no-fly zone and the bombing of Sudanese aircraft, airfields, and military and intelligence assets, Rice said in a 2006 article she co-authored with Anthony Lake and Donald Payne: “[I]f the United States fails to gain UN support [for these measures], we should act without it.”

In a similar spirit, Rice spoke at a 2006 event at the Brookings Institution where she criticized the Bush administration for its reluctance to use military force against the Sudanese government and stated: “I think the first thing that the international community ought to do is to strike Sudanese air assets, their aircraft, their helicopters, their airfields, that have been used relentlessly to attack innocent civilians in Darfur. Another option, albeit more controversial even than airstrikes, would be to blockade Port Sudan.”

Rice Joins the Obama Administration

In 2008, Rice served as a senior foreign-policy advisor to Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Immediately after Obama and running mate Joe Biden won the White House in the November election, Rice was named to the Obama-Biden Transition Project’s advisory board.

On May 12, 2008, Rice told The New York Times that President Obama had not pledged to meet unconditionally with the leaders of Iran or any other “rogue” state, contradicting what Obama had just said during a YouTube debate.

On December 1, 2008, President-elect Obama nominated Rice as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, making her the first African American woman ever to hold that post. Moreover, Obama upgraded the position to that of a cabinet-level post.

Calling for Massive Wealth Redistribution from the U.S. to Poorer Nations

Reasoning (contrary to much strong evidence) from the premise that poverty breeds terrorism, Rice and the Obama administration wanted U.S. taxpayers to fund nearly $100 billion per year of new-development-aid programs under the auspices of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Project — a massive wealth-redistribution initiative designed to transfer money from the world’s developed states to its poor states, many of them in Africa.

Rice Favors U.S. Participation in the World Conference Against Racism (2009)

Early in his administration, President Obama announced, against Rice’s counsel, that the U.S. would not participate in a scheduled 2009 “World Conference Against Racism” in Durban, South Africa, because that Conference’s official documents contained too many passages critical of Israel, too many restrictions on freedom of expression, and too much language calling for reparations to compensate contemporary nonwhites for the evils of Western slavery centuries ago. Rice, by contrast, held that U.S. participation in UN efforts such as the Durban Conference would serve the positive function of showing the world that Americans are willing to denounce the remnants of slavery and colonialism from a global platform.

Rice Pushes for UN Investigation of Israeli Attack on “Free Gaza Movement” Ship

On June 11, 2010, it was reported that Rice had played an important role in pushing the Obama administration to support a United Nations investigation into a deadly May 31 altercation between Israeli commandos and a number of passengers aboard a Gaza-bound, Free Gaza Movement ship whose crew had refused to comply with Israeli requirements that its cargo be submitted for inspection.

Rice Condemns Israeli “Settlement Activity”

In February 2011, Rice stated: “For more than four decades, [Israeli settlement activity] has undermined security … corroded hopes for peace … [and] violate[d] international commitments.” During testimony she gave two months later, Rice reiterated that sentiment, asserting that “Israeli settlement activity is illegitimate.”

Rice’s Soft Response to Mass Killings in Rwanda by Her Former Client, Rwandan President Paul Kagame

National Review Online writer Jim Geraghty has pointed out that in 2012, Rice, who was “in an official position shaping U.S. policy on Africa,” once “again faced criticism [that] she had softened the U.S. response to mass killings in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and [to Paul] Kagame’s support of violent rebel forces.” Against the backdrop of the fact that Kagame and Rice had a close personal relationship, Geraghty quotes a December 2012 New York Times piece that said:

“Specifically, these critics — who include officials of human rights organizations and United Nations diplomats — say the administration has not put enough pressure on Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, to end his support for the rebel movement whose recent capture of the strategic city of Goma in Congo set off a national crisis in a country that has already lost more than three million people in more than a decade of fighting. Rwanda’s support is seen as vital to the rebel group, known as M23.

“But according to rights organizations and diplomats at the United Nations, Ms. Rice has been at the forefront of trying to shield the Rwandan government, and Mr. Kagame in particular, from international censure, even as several United Nations reports have laid the blame for the violence in Congo at Mr. Kagame’s door. Aides to Ms. Rice acknowledge that she is close to Mr. Kagame and that Mr. Kagame’s government was her client when she worked at Intellibridge, a strategic analysis firm in Washington.”

Rice’s Assessment of the Deadly September 11, 2012 Terror Attack Against a U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi, Libya

On September 11, 2012, Islamist protesters stormed the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, where they destroyed the American flag and replaced it with a black Islamist flag that read, “There is one God, Allah, and Mohammad is his prophet.” The protesters said they were angry over an obscure YouTube film — known alternately as Innocence of Muslims or Muhammad, Prophet of the Muslims — that was critical of the Prophet Muhammad and had been produced recently in the U.S.

Later on September 11, 2012, a large group of heavily armed Islamic terrorists attacked a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya with much greater violence. In the process, they killed the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, 52-year-old Chris Stevens, and three other Americans. For nearly two weeks, Rice and the rest of the Obama administration consistently characterized what had occurred in Benghazi not as an act of terrorism, but as a spontaneous, unplanned uprising that evolved unexpectedly from what had begun as a low-level protest against the aforementioned YouTube video. In reality, however, within mere hours after the incident, U.S. intelligence agencies had already gained more than enough evidence to conclude unequivocally that the attack on the mission was a planned terrorist incident, and that the video had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Rice made big headlines on September 16, 2012, when she appeared on five separate Sunday television news programs where she claimed, falsely, that according to the “best information at present,” the deadly attack in Benghazi was not a premeditated assault but rather a “spontaneous reaction” to “a hateful and offensive video that was widely disseminated throughout the Arab and Muslim world.” For example, she told Bob Schieffer on CBS’s Face the Nation:

“[W]e’ll want to see the results of that investigation to draw any definitive conclusions. But based on the best information we have to date, what our assessment is as of the present is in fact what began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy … sparked by this hateful video. But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that—in that effort with heavy weapons of the sort that are, unfortunately, readily now available in Libya post-revolution. And that it spun from there into something much, much more violent…. We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.”

Post-Benghazi

On December 13, 2012, Rice — having sparked much public controversy with her false statements regarding Benghazi — withdrew herself from consideration for the post of Secretary of State (to replace the outgoing Hillary Clinton). In a letter to President Obama, Rice said that her nomination process (before the U.S. Senate) “would be lengthy, disruptive and costly — to you and to our most pressing national and international priorities,” and that “the tradeoff is simply not worth it to our country.” Later in the letter, she aimed a transparent jab at Republicans who opposed her nomination: “The position of Secretary of State should never be politicized.”

In June 2013 President Obama appointed Rice as his top national security adviser — a post that did not require Senate confirmation. Rice replaced the outgoing Tom Donilon, who had announced his resignation. As author and retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters wrote at the time: “Bringing Rice into the Executive Branch’s innermost circle rewards her for being a good soldier in taking the fall on Benghazi, and it makes it virtually impossible for Congress to subpoena her for a grilling, thanks to our government’s separation of powers. Sharp move, Mr. President.”

In a December 2013 interview with 60 Minutes, Rice was asked whether she had any second thoughts or regrets about having helped to advance the Obama administration’s (false) narrative claiming that the 9/11/12 attacks in Benghazi were spontaneous and unplanned outgrowths of protests against an anti-Muslim YouTube video, rather than carefully orchestrated terrorist events. “I don’t have time to think about a false controversy,” she replied. “In the midst of all of the swirl about things like talking points, the administration’s been working very, very hard across the globe to review our security of our embassies and our facilities. That’s what we ought to be focused on.”

Rice was also asked why she — rather than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — had appeared on the five Sunday television news programs on September 16, 2012 to give the administration’s version of the events. “She [Mrs. Clinton] had just gone through an incredibly painful and stressful week,” said Rice. “Secretary Clinton — as our chief diplomat — had to reach out to the families, had to greet the bodies upon their arrival at Andrews Air Force Base. If I were her, the last thing I would have wanted to do is five Sunday morning talk shows. So I think it’s perfectly understandable. So when the White House asked me, I agreed to do it.”

Rice Attends Ahmadinejad’s UN Speech & Then Snubs Netanyahu

On September 26, 2012, Rice attended a speech that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered to the United Nations General Assembly, in which he: (a) referred to Israelis as “uncivilized Zionists”; (b) denied the historical reality of the Holocaust; and (c) repeatedly called for the annihilation of Israel. But the very next day, Rice opted not to attend the UN speech of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Rice Speaks About American Soldier Bo Bergdahl

Rice sparked additional controversy when she spoke out in support of a May 31, 2014 deal in which President Obama freed five senior Taliban commanders and high-value terrorists who had been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay since 2002, in exchange for the release of Bowe Bergdahl, an American Army soldier who had deserted the military in 2009 and spent the next five years with the Taliban. (Eight other American soldiers were subsequently killed in the process of trying to find and recover Bergdahl.) Just before his 2009 desertion, Bergdahl had emailed this message to his father: “I am ashamed to be an American…. The horror that is America is disgusting.” On June 1, 2014, Susan Rice told CNN that Bergdahl had served the U.S. with “honor and distinction.” When ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked whether Bergdahl was a deserter who would face punishment for his actions, Rice replied:

“Certainly anybody who’s been held in those conditions, in captivity for five years, has paid an extraordinary price. But that is really not the point. The point is that he’s back…. He is going to be safely reunited with his family. He served the United States with honor and distinction. And we’ll have the opportunity eventually to learn what has transpired in the past years, but what’s most important now is his health and well being, that he have the opportunity to recover in peace and security and be reunited with his family. Which is why this is such a joyous day.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Rice said: “Sergeant Bergdahl wasn’t simply a hostage; he was an American prisoner of war captured on the battlefield…. We have a sacred obligation that we have upheld since the founding of our republic to do our utmost to bring back our men and women who are taken in battle, and we did that in this instance.”[1]

Eventually — on March 25, 2015 — the U.S. Army announced that Bergdahl was being charged with desertion.

Rice’s False Statement About Turkey’s Assistance in the U.S. Fight Against ISIS

In an October 12, 2014 interview on Meet the Press, Rice responded to a question about Turkey’s obvious lack of cooperation in the U.S. fight against the ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) terrorist group which had recently overrun vast swaths of Syria and Iraq with a brutal campaign of mass slaughter, crucifixions, beheadings, rapes, and enslavement. Said Rice:

“[F]irst of all, the Turks have, this just in the last several days, made a commitment that they will in the first instance allow the United States and our partners to use Turkish bases and territory to train — hold on, let me explain this carefully — to train the moderate Syrian opposition forces. So that is a new commitment. They have now joined Saudi Arabia in giving the go-head for that important contribution. In addition, they have said that their facilities inside of Turkey can be used by the coalition forces, American and otherwise, to engage in activities inside of Iraq and Syria. That’s a new commitment, and one that we very much welcome.”

But Rice’s assertion was a lie. The Turkish government swiftly responded to her claims by declaring that no decision had been reached regarding the use of its military bases by the U.S. to engage in activities inside of Iraq and Syria. According to the Turkish prime minister’s office, Turkey had agreed only to the training of supposedly “moderate” Syrian rebels on Turkish soil.

Rice’s Speech on National Security & Economic Inequality

On February 6, 2015, Rice delivered a speech on national security in which she articulated her belief — which was consistent with that of President Obama — that economic inequality is a major driver of violence and terrorism:

“President Obama has deepened our commitment to promoting that basic American value: equality…. Advancing equality [both at home and internationally] is both morally right and smart strategy.  If we reduce disparities, which can lead to instability and violence, we increase our shared security.  Reams of empirical evidence demonstrate how countries do better—across every metric—when they tap the talents of all their people.  So, we champion the rights of vulnerable communities—those targeted by abuse or excluded from society—and counter escalating cycles of hatred that can spark violence.  Mass killings threaten our common security and diminish our shared humanity, so we affirm that governments have a responsibility to protect civilians.  We’ll continue to lead global efforts to prevent atrocities and hold accountable those who commit the worst abuses…. [W]e are committed to seizing the future that lies beyond the crisis of the day and to pursuing a vision of the world as it can and should be.”

Rice’s Gaffe Regarding Nigerian Literary Icon Chinua Achebe

On May 23, 2015, Rice posted two emotional tweets on the passing of Nigerian literary icon Chinua Achebe:

  • “[T]oday is a somber day in Nigeria, as Chinua Achebe was laid to rest in his native village.”
  • “A giant of African lit., he brought the Continent-and Nigeria, in particular-2 the world. His works left lasting impression on me”

But in fact, Achebe had died two years earlier, in March 2013, at age 82. After other Twitter users pointed out Rice’s mistake, she removed her tweets.

Supporting the Iran Nuclear Deal

In 2015, Rice publicly lauded the Iran nuclear deal as the “most comprehensive and effective” anti-nuclear agreement ever devised. She has continued to support the deal ever since. When President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal in 2018, for instance, Rice falsely stated that “Iran has fully complied with its obligations,” and that the inspections authorized by the deal were “the most intrusive international inspection and monitoring regime in history.

Anti-Israel Vote in the UN Security Council

In December 2016, Rice, while serving as national security adviser to then-president Obama, instructed the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, to abstain from voting against UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which: (a) condemned the existence and expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and (b) declared that all of eastern Jerusalem – including Judaism’s most sacred site, the Temple Mount – was “Palestinian territory” that was being “occupied” by Israel in “a flagrant violation under international law.” This abstention allowed  this resolution to pass, prompting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to condemn the Obama administration’s “shameful betrayal.”

Turning a Blind Eye to Russian Cyber Attacks

In their 2018 book, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, investigative reporters David Corn and Michael Isikoff report that in June 2016, Michael Daniel, the director of cybersecurity for the Obama White House, was alarmed to learn that Russian actors had successfully infiltrated critical election infrastructure in a number of U.S. states. According to Business Insider: “Obama administration officials did not believe the Russians had the technological savvy to manipulate the vote count. Rather, they were more concerned hackers could alter voter rolls, registration files, or other processes that could sow doubt about the legitimacy of the election as a whole.”

As evidence of this Russian cyberactivity came to light, Mr. Daniel and Celeste Wallander, the National Security Council’s leading Russia analyst, pushed for the Obama administration to retaliate decisively – e.g., by: (a) conducting NSA-backed cyberattacks targeting the Russian intelligence community and Russia-linked actors; (b) leaking classified intelligence revealing the financial activities of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his family members; or (c) announcing a joint U.S.-NATO “cyber exercise” designed to show Russia that America and its Western allies were capable of responding forcefully to its illicit activities. But when Rice learned of these ideas, she told Daniel: “Don’t get ahead of us,” adding that the U.S. cyber response team should “knock it off” and take no action. Said Business Insider in March 2018:

“The staffers on Daniel’s cyber response team were baffled when he informed them that they had been told to stand down. When they asked the cybersecurity director why they weren’t taking action, Daniel reportedly told them [that] Rice and the homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, were concerned that then-President Barack Obama would be ‘boxed in’ if news of their deliberations leaked to the press…. The White House’s internal struggle over how to address Russia’s election meddling has been well documented. Last year, The Washington Post reported that when they were faced with the question of how best to respond to Russia’s meddling, one senior official told the outlet, ‘I feel like we sort of choked.’”

Rice’s Role in “Unmasking” Trump-Affiliated Individuals in Intelligence Reports

In the course of conducting intelligence operations on terrorist organizations or other foreign entities, American national security agents often collect information on “U.S. persons” – a term of art referring to United States citizens and lawful permanent residents – who are not under surveillance themselves. The intelligence community refers to such occurrences as examples of “incidental collection.” In incidentally collected communications, the name of the person whose conversations have been intercepted is supposed to be redacted or “masked” – i.e., replaced with a generic identifier – unless the information is thought to have value as foreign intelligence. Masking is carried out to protect individuals who may get inadvertently caught up in an electronic dragnet, from being falsely accused of crimes or of otherwise improper behavior.

Conversely, the “unmasking” of a “U.S. person” – i.e., the identification of such an individual by name – is an extraordinarily powerful tool that requires review at the highest levels of government. Only the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA are authorized to unmask U.S. persons, and then only for reasons of national security. And if these agencies do unmask someone, his or her identity may only released to the few intelligence officials (about 20 or so) who are authorized to make an unmasking request. In short, the practice of unmasking is not in itself illegal, but the leaking of an unmasked person’s identity to anyone other than the aforementioned small group of intelligence officials, is.

In 2016, U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice made multiple unmasking requests, so that she and her political allies could compile a list of names of incoming Donald Trump campaign officials who had been incidentally monitored during intelligence surveillance of foreign governments. The names of these Trump associates, which included some of his family members, had been redacted in the intelligence reports, but Rice requested that they be unmasked. Their names were then disseminated to the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, then-CIA Director John Brennan, and Rice’s former deputy, Ben Rhodes.

When then-House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-California) announced, during a March 2017 press conference, that the identities of U.S. citizens had been leaked by Obama officials for partisan political purposes, Rice professed ignorance: “I know nothing about this. I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that count today.”

The following month, however, Rice’s story began to change. On April 4, for instance, she tweeted that she had simply meant that she did not know “what reports Nunes was referring to.” Later that month, she said that she had never done anything “untoward with respect to the intelligence” which she had received.

In April 2017 as well, a blockbuster Bloomberg News report indicated that Rice had requested or directed that the identities of a number of individuals involved with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign be “unmasked” in raw intelligence reports that would then be widely distributed throughout the federal government and its intelligence agencies – a massive and unprecedented violation of standard policy.

Regarding Rice’s actions, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew C. McCarthy, who believed that Rice’s actions constituted a “monumental abuse of power,” wrote in April 2017:

“The thing to bear in mind is that the White House does not do investigations. Not criminal investigations, not intelligence investigations…. [W]e’ve been told for weeks that any unmasking of people in Trump’s circle that may have occurred had two innocent explanations: (1) the FBI’s investigation of Russian meddling in the election and (2) the need to know, for purposes of understanding the communications of foreign intelligence targets, the identities of Americans incidentally intercepted or mentioned. The unmasking, Obama apologists insist, had nothing to do with targeting Trump or his people.

“That won’t wash. In general, it is the FBI that conducts investigations that bear on American citizens suspected of committing crimes or of acting as agents of foreign powers. In the matter of alleged Russian meddling, the investigative camp also includes the CIA and the NSA…. There would have been no _intelligence _need for Susan Rice to ask for identities to be unmasked. If there had been a real need to reveal the identities — an intelligence need based on American interests — the unmasking would have been done by the investigating agencies. The national-security adviser is not an investigator. She is a White House staffer. The president’s staff is a consumer of intelligence, not a generator or collector of it. If Susan Rice was unmasking Americans, it was not to fulfill an intelligence need based on American interests; it was to fulfill a political desire based on Democratic-party interests.”

In September 2017, Rice told House investigators that, in an effort to understand why the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates had visited Trump Tower in New York in 2016 without notifying the U.S. government, she had in fact requested the unmasking of American citizens affiliated with Trump.

Rice Lies About Syria’s Chemical Weapons

In a January 16, 2017 interview with NPR, Rice boasted that the Obama administration had successfully eliminated the threat of Syrian chemical weapons:

“We were able to find a solution that didn’t necessitate the use of force that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria, in a way that the use of force would never have accomplished. Our aim in contemplating the use of force following the use of chemical weapons [by Syria] in August of 2013 was not to intervene in the civil war, not to become involved in the combat between [Bashar-al] Assad and the opposition, but to deal with the threat of chemical weapons by virtue of the diplomacy that we did with Russia and with the Security Council. We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile.”

But less than three months later, on April 4, 2017, Assad’s government carried out a deadly chemical-weapons attack against the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib Province.

Rice’s Controversial Email to Herself, Written a Few Minutes After the Obama Administration Had Come to an End

On the afternoon of January 21, 2017 – fifteen minutes after newly elected President Donald Trump had been sworn into office, and thus, fifteen minutes after Rice’s tenure as national-security adviser had ended – Rice wrote an email to herself which stated:

“On January 5, following a briefing by IC leadership on Russian hacking during the 2016 Presidential election, President Obama had a brief follow-on conversation with FBI Director Jim Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates in the Oval Office. Vice President Biden and I were also present.

“President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book.’ The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.

“From a national security perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.

….[one longer or two shorter paragraphs redacted]….

“The President asked Comey to inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team. Comey said he would.”

Regarding Rice’s email, former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy wrote in National Review: “[I]t’s not really an email-to-self. It is quite consciously an email for the record…. [F]or at least a few more minutes, Rice still had access to her government email account. She could still generate an official record. That’s what she wanted her brief email to be: the dispositive memorialization of a meeting she was worried about — a meeting that had happened over two weeks earlier [January 5], at which, of course, President Obama insisted that everything be done ‘by the book.’ […] 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.” To read McCarthy’s analysis of Rice’s likely motives for writing the email in question, see Note #2 below.[2]

Rice Says That North Korea Should Be Accepted As a Nuclear Power

In August 2017, Rice said that President Donald Trump should accept North Korea as a nuclear power, despite the fact that North Korean President Kim Jong Un was repeatedly threatening to launch nuclear missiles into American cities. “History shows that we can, if we must, tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea — the same way we tolerated the far greater threat of thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons during the Cold War,” Rice wrote in a New York Times op-ed wherein she criticized Trump’s recent warning that any nuclear provocation by North Korea would be met with military “fire and fury.” Calling Trump’s rhetoric “unprecedented and especially dangerous,” Rice added: “John Kelly, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, must assert control over the White House, including his boss, and curb the Trump surrogates whipping up Cuban missile crisis fears.”

Rice Supports U.S. Funding of UNRWA

In 2018, Rice was one of seven former American ambassadors to the UN to sign a letter calling for the Trump administration to restore funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), despite clear evidence of that agency’s close ties to Hamas and its promotion of terrorist ideology and anti-Semitism

Rice Publishes Anti-Trump Op-Ed in The New York Times

Rice penned an op-ed piece, harshly critical of President Trump’s foreign policy, which appeared in The New York Times on May 5, 2019. Asserting that Trump’s approach to international affairs “appears impulsive, improvisational, and inchoate—devoid of clear purpose, values, or even ideology,” she claimed that the “unifying theme” of Trump’s foreign policy was “simply to service his domestic politics.”

Rice further accused Trump of: (a) routinely placing himself and the Republican Party “over our country”; (b) encouraging Russia to interfere in American elections in a manner that would benefit him; and (c) deviating from past policy vis-a-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to “curry favor” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to stoke “right-wing political support” in the form of “red meat to energize the Republican base.”

Rice also criticized Trump for re-imposing sanctions against the communist regime in Cuba, and she denounced him for “trumpet[ing] the bogus threat of Venezuelan-style ‘socialism’ invading America through the Democratic Party.”

Accusing Trump of seeking to “whip the Republican political base into what is now their reliably biennial anti-immigrant frenzy,” Rice went on to conclude her piece by saying: “Plenty of presidents before Mr. Trump have made serious, sometimes catastrophic foreign policy mistakes; but, few, if any, decided almost every aspect of foreign policy on the basis of what would help him get reelected. The Republican Party has largely abdicated its responsibilities in favor of the whims of a president guided solely by personal and political interests, even in executing the most sacred and solemn duty of the office—to keep America safe.”

Exploiting the Coronavirus Crisis As a Justification to Push for Vote-by-Mail and “a More Equitable Society”

In April 2020, as the coronavirus / COVID-19 pandemic was wreaking havoc on the U.S. economy and American life, Rice said in an interview with CNN:

“This is a moment not only of crisis, but inherent in that crisis is opportunity. And we need to take steps to broaden our social safety net to ensure that the most vulnerable have the healthcare, have the education, have the housing that they need.

“But in the immediate term, because many of those things are going to take time and being ambitious, I recommend two critical steps that Congress could take in the next legislation that it passes. One is to ensure that every American has the ability to vote safely in our November election…. [W]e have a real challenge to ensure that voters are able to access the ballot by mail, by longer periods of early voting, by safer polling stations, and that is the job of congress to ensure.

“And secondly, Congress can make a down payment on this effort to build a more equitable society by expanding national service. And in particular by creating something called a health force which can begin by employing unemployed Americans, students and the like to be contact tracers. At this moment, when a 100,000 to 300,000 of them are going to be needed for us to test, trace and open up safely.”

Rice Condemns President Trump’s Call for Patriotic Education & Speaks of a “Living” Constitution

During a September 2020 broadcast of CNN’s OutFront, host Erin Burnett said: “[President Trump] just said something else today, signed an executive order creating the quote ‘1776 commission.’ And the goal of it, and I want to quote, from the order is to ‘restore patriotic education to our schools,’ as if that education has been gone. He went after The New York Times for its quote, ‘1619 project,’ which aims to reframe this nation’s history with a greater focus on slavery…. What is your response to the president?” Rice replied:

“This was one of the most astonishing speeches I’ve heard him give. He talks about patriotic education. I thought I was listening to Mao Zedong running communist China. We don’t have the education where the dear leader tells the people what they must learn. We open students’ minds. We give them facts. We teach them how to analyze. We teach them civics and the foundations of the Constitution. When you study the Constitution, which it appears Donald Trump hasn’t, you understand it is a living document that has evolved. He heralded today the signing of the Constitution in 1787 as a great day, it was. I love the Constitution. I’ve sworn an oath to protect it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. In 1787, you and I, Erin, and all women in our country couldn’t participate in the democracy. We had no vote. If you were African-American and a male, the constitution of 1787 said you are worth 3/5 of a human being.[3]  So, to celebrate that and deny the realities of our history, positive and negative, and to wipe out the history of slavery in this country and to call the teaching of it un-American is the most communist, retro, crazy thing I’ve heard out of Donald Trump’s mouth in a while.”

Appointed to President Joe Biden’s Domestic Policy Council

On December 11, 2020, President-elect Joe Biden named Rice to serve as the Director his White House Domestic Policy Council.

Heading the Biden Administration’s Gun-Control Efforts

In late May 2022, President Biden put Rice in charge of the administration’s gun-control efforts. “She is coordinating the President’s whole-of-government approach to reducing gun violence,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stated at a May 26 daily briefing.

Chairing the New White House Steering Committee on Equity

On February 16, 2023, President Biden issued an “Executive Order on Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through The Federal Government,” which established a new “White House Steering Committee on Equity” that would aim to “transform” federal agencies by: (a) “advanc[ing] an ambitious, whole-of-government approach to racial equity and support for underserved communities, and (b) “continuously embed[ding] equity into all aspects of Federal decision-making.” This Executive Order mandated that within a month, every major federal agency would be required to establish “Agency Equity Teams” which would submit, to the Steering Committee, annual racialized plans for “the implementation of equity initiatives” designed to “delive[r] equitable outcomes for the American people.” Susan Rice was named chairwoman of the Steering Committee.

In response to the creation of this new Steering Committee, America First Legal president Stephen Miller said:

With the stroke of a pen, Biden has transformed the entire federal government into a DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] cult—putting equity czars inside virtually every single agency of the executive branch and subordinating every department to the Marxist equity agenda. Every previous law and regulation must now be reinterpreted to ensure racial and gender equity: in other words, to achieve a predetermined racial or gender identity outcome even if it requires ruthless discrimination against American citizens.

Rice says Racism Has Cost the U.S. Economy $16 Trillion

During a speech she delivered at a convention of Al Sharpton‘s National Action Network on April 12, 2023, Rice — citing information contained in a Citibank report titled “Closing The Racial Inequality Gaps: The Economic Cost of Black Inequality in the U.S” — said: “In the last 20 years, the U.S. had a GDP shortfall of $16 trillion due to discrimination against black Americans. If we closed our racial gaps, we could add another $5 trillion to GDP over just the next five years. And in case you’re wondering, that’s not my math. That’s according to Citibank. We all benefit when every community has the chance to thrive.”

Later in her address, Rice claimed that black history was being eliminated from classrooms and textbooks in states like Florida, where the tenets of critical race theory were being banned from instruction in public schools. “Today, in states across the nation, we’re seeing bans on innocuous children’s books, just because they feature prominently black or brown characters,” she said. “We’re seeing black history erased from our classrooms and textbooks. And make no mistake those who are doing this are trying to tell us that we do not count That we do not matter. And that perhaps we should not exist. Black history is American history. Truth is truth. We must fight to protect our history.”

Rice’s Positions on Racial Issues

Late in his presidency, Donald Trump issued an executive order establishing The 1776 Commission, an advisory committee designed to address the need for American schools to provide students with a “patriotic education,” and to counter the America-hating narrative of Critical Race Theory. Trump’s successor in the White House, Joe Biden, revoked Trump’s executive order — on grounds that the “systemic racism that has plagued our nation for far, far too long” simply “couldn’t be ignored any longer.” Supporting Biden’s decision, Rice lamented “just how serious a problem we face from nationalists and white supremacists who have demonstrated a willingness to resort to violence in some instances.”

In June 2020, Rice smeared the Trump presidency as “an administration which has been racist to its core for the last three and a half years, from comparing the peaceful protesters at Charlottesville to white supremacists, calling white supremacists very fine people, all the way through to the recent weeks where the administration has disparaged the Black Lives Matter movement, disparaged the peaceful protesters, and basically made plain that they prefer to stand by a Confederate legacy than a modern America, it’s been an administration whose record on race is just disgraceful.” Moreover, Rice described presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden as “somebody who can heal and unify the nation and remove Donald Trump and consign him and those who supported him in the Senate to the trash heap of history.”

In July 2020, Rice argued that unequal racial outcomes in terms of metrics like median income, educational achievement, and incarceration rates were the root causes of many “domestic divisions” in America. “We’ve got to heal [those divisions] as a matter of national survival, as a matter of our democratic viability and as a matter of national security,” said Rice. “What we really need is to have leaders and policies that are designed in a fundamental way to redress the injustices and disparities that are so long-standing and entrenched,” she added.

That same month, Rice was asked if she supported the removal, from public spaces, of statues, flags, monuments, and other symbols honoring Confederate figures. She replied: “I welcome every flag that is changed and taken down, and I’m happy to see statues retired to museums through rational processes.”

In 2020 as well, Rice lamented that the “defund the police” movement had become a political “lightning rod.” Steering clear, therefore, of the phrase “defund the police,” she advocated “a constructive reallocation of resources.” “I can get behind the notion of reimagining how policing is done so police are not being asked to be social workers and do a bunch of things they’re not trained or equipped to do,” she said.

On January 26, 2021, Rice said that “for too many American families, systemic racism and inequality in our economy, laws, and institutions still put the American dream far out of reach.”

That same day, Rice stated that under the Biden administration: “Every agency will place equity at the core of their public engagement, their policy design and program delivery to ensure that government resources are reaching Americans of color, and all marginalized communities, rural, urban, disabled, LGBTQ+, religious minorities, and so many others.”

Rice’s Enormous Wealth

In a disclosure filing that she released on March 20, 2021, Rice reported that she held between $36 million and $149 million in various assets — far more than the $13.6 million to $40.4 million she had reported in 2009. According to an ABC News report in 2021: “In her most recent filing, Rice reported holding shares worth between $250,000 and $5 million in major corporations including Johnson & Johnson, Apple and Microsoft. She also had a significant amount of stock options in Netflix, where she served as a board member, and reported earning more than $300,000 from exercising Netflix stock options in the past year. In addition, she reported shares in several oil and gas industry companies, including $1 million to $5 million of holdings in the Canadian multinational natural gas distribution company Enbridge Inc.”

Additional Information

Rice has served as a board member of numerous entities, including the National Democratic Institute, the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, the Atlantic Council, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, the Bureau of National Affairs, the Partnership for Public Service,  the Beauvoir National Cathedral Elementary School, and Netflix (2018-19).

Rice has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Strategy Group.

Footnotes:


  1. In a June 3, 2014 interview on Fox News, Col. Ralph Peters explained that Rice’s assertion about the purported American tradition of rescuing or “bringing home” all those who were “taken in battle” was false. Said Peters: “I’m sick of hearing people … instant experts, who never served in the military, saying, well, we always went after our … troops [to] bring them home, even if they were deserters…. [T]hroughout much of our history, we did go after deserters, and when we got them we shot them or hanged them. Or, if we were in a good mood, we would brand them with a ‘D’ on their cheeks or forehead. When we became enlightened in the 20th century we still shot some, but we always sent them to prison and hard labor.”
  2. According to Andrew C. McCarthy:”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.”Let’s think about what was going on at that moment. It had been just a few days since Obama imposed sanctions on Russia. In that connection, the Kremlin’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, had contacted Trump’s designated national-security adviser, Michael Flynn. Obama-administration leadership despised Flynn, who (a) had been fired by Obama from his post as Defense Intelligence Agency chief; (b) had become a key Trump supporter and an intense critic of Obama foreign and national-security policy; and (c) was regarded by Yates and Comey as a possible criminal suspect — on the wayward theories that Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak could smack of a corrupt quid pro quo deal to drop the sanctions and might violate the never invoked, constitutionally dubious Logan Act.”What else was happening? The Justice Department and FBI had gone to the FISA court on October 21, 2016, for a warrant to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. That warrant relied largely on the Steele dossier, which alleged a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin involving (a) a cyberespionage operation against the 2016 election, (b) corrupt negotiations regarding the sanctions, and (c) the Kremlin’s possession of ‘kompromat’ that would enable the Putin regime to blackmail President-elect Trump.”Significantly, by the time of this January 6 meeting with Trump, the 90-day surveillance period under the FISA warrant would have had just a bit over two weeks left to run — it was set to expire just as Trump was to take office. (Reporting suggests that there may also have been a FISA warrant on Paul Manafort around this time.) The Obama administration was therefore confronting a deadline if the FISA warrant was to be renewed while Obama was still in power. The officials in the meeting would need to figure out how the investigation could continue despite the fact that its central focus, Trump, was about to be sworn in as president….”Obviously, if Obama was having a ‘follow-on conversation’ with Yates and Comey, what it was following on was the briefing he’d just received about an investigation implicating the Trump campaign in Russian espionage…. There would be no reason to have such a follow-on conversation unless Obama wanted an update on what his law-enforcement officials were doing.”Consequently, 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….”Far more important are the last paragraphs of Rice’s email. She recounted that ‘President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.’ There follows a blacked-out paragraph…. Rice then closes with Obama’s instruction to Comey to inform Obama ‘if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team.’”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 strategy 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.”
  3. Rice’s characterization of the famous three-fifths compromise is a gross distortion, as Walter E. Williams explains here.

Additional Resources:


This Is Susan Rice
By Discover The Networks
December 15, 2020

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