Former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice (Getty)
Fox & Friends morning hosts Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt, and Brian Kilmeade
raked the mainstream media over the coals Tuesday morning for the major networks decision to ignore the news that President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, was the person who requested to unmask the names of Trump transition officials caught up in surveillance.
“If you open up (The New York Times) to page 16, you have this story,” said Kilmeade.
“The lead story,” Doocy joked, as all three chuckled about the placement of the news on Page A16.
It has been revealed that Rice repeatedly asked for the identities of Trump associates caught up in surveillance with foreign entities to be unmasked, and later, the Obama administration changed the classification of unmasked documents to “spread it inside the government,” said Doocy.
“Absolutely legal but it broke the spirit of the law because those transcripts and names were leaked to the press, which of course is a felony,” he said. “We’re not saying she’s the leaker, we just know she’s the unmasker.”
Earhardt railed about Rice’s dishonesty in the Benghazi scandal, noting that Rice appeared on five Sunday news shows and insisted that the attacks that killed three Americans in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, were spontaneous and came about as a result on an anti-Muslim video posted on the internet. It was later revealed that the incident was a planned terrorist attack.
“The question is can we trust her, Earhardt asked, noting Rice’s recent appearance on PBS during which she claimed to know nothing about the recent allegations of her being the unmasker.
Rice has been identified as the person who made dozens of requests to intelligence agencies “to unmask the American on the other side of this conversation with some type of foreign entity,” Kilmeade said, adding that there was a big push toward the end of the Obama presidency to “fan out” that information to the various intelligence agencies as the transition of power took place between the Obama and Trump administrations.
The New York Post reported on the story Monday, noting that “normally, the names of American citizens collected in such a manner are redacted.”
Earhadt said the left is spinning the story to highlight that so far nothing illegal has been shown to have occurred, with Democrats floating the talking point that “it’s not unusual.”
“This not even a gray area, it’s black and white, it is illegal for this to be leaked to the press for the public to see this,” she said.
She later asked, “Why in the world is someone who works for President Obama, why is she surveilling the opposing party’s nominee for president?”
Doocy was nonplussed as to why the three major networks have buried the story.
“Don’t you think this is a big story?” he asked. “If one political party essentially is spying on the other, Brian ,what page was it on in the New York Times, A16?
“Mainstream media coverage last night – the big three, ABC no time for it. NBC no time for it. CBS had 45 seconds for it. Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer thinks that this lack of media coverage is, well, peculiar and interesting.”
Sean Spicer (Getty)
Spicer has told the press corp that he was perplexed by their “lack of interest … in these developments when it goes in one direction versus … other amounts of interest that have come from this room and beyond.”