White House aide Sebastian Gorka and Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday boldly speculated about the Obama administration surveilling the Trump transition team, a situation they see as “beyond Watergate.”
Gorka suggested, based on the comments of a “former operative” he heard speaking on Hannity’s radio show, that officials in Obama’s White House could have been analyzing the phone patterns of Trump’s top staffers. His argument hinged on many “ifs.”
“If you want to attack me or Steve Bannon or Steve Miller or Kellyanne Conway, you say, ‘Oh, they regularly call their nephew in Canada. Well, that’s a foreigner,” he said. “I don’t need the same kind of intelligence authorities to intercept a foreign call. Then you start to find a way to unmask all of these conversations so that you can make political profit. That’s a very, very tenable theory.”
“And that’s the kind of thing we have to find out if it was really happening,” Gorka continued. “Because if that’s the case, that is weaponizing intelligence for political purposes against your other party.”
There is no evidence to suggest that anything like what Gorka described had occurred.
Their speculation was based on reports that Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, requested the unmasking of U.S. persons on intelligence reports that contained information about Trump campaign staffers.
Rice said that unmasking requests were a routine part of her role monitoring foreign governments, an explanation with which national security experts agreed, and noted that requesting the identity of a minimized U.S. person in an intelligence report is not the same as leaking that identity to the press. She insisted that she “leaked nothing to nobody and never have and never would.”
Still, the conservative press, and a few Republican lawmakers, have seized on the reports about Rice as evidence that the Obama administration was spying on Trump staffers.
President Donald Trump asserted without evidence on Wednesday that he believes Rice may have committed a crime.
Gorka and Hannity were similarly fired up during their conversation, with the Fox host alleging that the “weaponizing” of intelligence information was “beyond Watergate on steroids and human growth hormones.”
“Losing 14 minutes of audiotape in comparison of this is a little spat in the sandbox in the kindergarten,” Gorka concurred.
