L-R: Kathryn Ruemmler, President Obama, Lisa Monaco, Susan Rice
KT McFarland provides her perspective on the newly unclassified segment of the Susan Rice memo to herself.
The bottom line about what took place in the 48 hours of January 4th and January 5th 2017 is not that complex. Remember, the position of President Obama and Susan Rice is that the White House was unaware of any FBI investigation of Flynn (or the Trump campaign); nor did they have any involvement in directing it to take place.
When Clapper briefed Obama (Jan 4th) about the Flynn intercept the White House lost deniability; Obama was now demonstrably aware of an FBI investigation. The stay behind meeting (Jan 5th) was the result of the White House reassembling deniability.
Here’s the full memo in context (including the redacted paragraph):
A day or two prior to this meeting DNI James Clapper briefed President Obama on the nature of the call between Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Michael Flynn.
James Clapper received raw “intelligence cuts” about the call from FBI Director James Comey and used them to brief President Obama.
It gets very sticky for the Obama white house to claim they didn’t know about, nor direct, an FBI investigation of Michael Flynn given the fact they were briefed on the intercepted phone communications conveyed by the FBI, via Clapper, to President Obama.
If the FBI wasn’t investigating Flynn, then why were they intercepting his calls?
Understandably President Obama and NSA Susan Rice would be worried about being attached to a potentially very unlawful investigation of the incoming administration and NSA Michael Flynn; hence the ‘stay behind’ meeting.
As a result of prior briefing material President Obama knew the FBI was monitoring and intercepting Flynn’s communication. The aspect of Obama questioning Comey about sharing sensitive information from Flynn; and Comey’s response; points to Obama/Rice knowledge of an FBI operation against Flynn. An FBI operation against Flynn (and Trump) that Susan Rice knows she needs to specifically claim she and Obama did not know about.
From a hindsight perspective it gets very sticky for Obama/Rice to deny knowledge with that 1/5/17 meeting content in the fray. That’s the purpose of the Jan 20th CYA memo to file. Think about it:
Question: Ms Rice how can you claim to have no knowledge of an FBI investigation when the FBI was providing the White House FBI with intercepts of Flynn communication?
Are you saying the FBI intercepts were not authorized by President Obama?
Rice’s CYA memo is attempting to say exactly that. She’s pinning FBI Director James Comey as “rogue.”
Without the memo FBI Director James Comey could claim President Obama and Susan Rice were well aware of the FBI’s Flynn operation. With the memoObama/Rice position themselves as having no idea until Comey started talking…
That’s the purpose for the memo; Obama & Rice protecting themselves from Comey if things go sideways.
To further illustrate this intent, it’s worth remembering the letter from Susan Rice’s lawyer, Kathryn Ruemmler to the Senate:
Note the second to last paragraph, it’s all about denying knowledge of FBI operations, writ large, against the Trump campaign or incoming administration.
When James Clapper walked directly into the White House with “intelligence cuts” specifically from the FBI to share with President Obama, it’s likely the legal team around Obama -specifically including Kathryn Reummler- went bananas.
James Clapper was always a doofus, but usefully so. However, in this context doofus Clapper -with his FBI cuts in hand- just infected the White House with direct knowledge of an ongoing FBI investigation of the incoming administration. In that briefing Clapper just walked over their carefully assembled plausible deniability like an ox in the oval.
D’oh.
The ‘pull aside’ meeting immediately thereafter, January 5th, was Obama and Susan Rice cleaning up the mess and reassembling their plausible deniability.
The January 20th Susan Rice memo-to-file was supportive material for that intention.