President Trump tweeted earlier today referencing a news report by Fox reporter Adam Housley which ran on Fox and Friends.

The substance of the segment (video below) is quite startling as it highlights reports from inside the intelligence community of surveillance on Donald Trump “for up to a year before inauguration”.

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Adam Housley reporting:

[Partial Transcript] We know that there was this. There was electronic surveillance on Trump and the people close to Donald Trump, including some supporters, for up to a year before inauguration. That information was disseminated, we’re told, through NSA channels. It’s unprecedented, I’m told, the way this was done. The mention of US citizens is supposed to be masked, whether, that means taken out of a report.

So, for example, I call somebody in Bulgaria and that’s picked up some how by our agencies and there’s nothing there involving national security, there’s nothing there involving a crime, that report would come out and say American #1 or my name would not be there.

What I’m told now is that when these reports came out names were there and that is unprecedented.

Basically, they say that the information that was unmasking, this unmasked information, these names of Americans who had done nothing wrong was disseminated to all of the NSC [National Security Council], some at DOD [Department of Defense], Clapper [James Clapper, Office of Direction of National Intelligence], Brennan [John Brennan, CIA Director], basically the people at the top.

They also say I’m told that [Susan] Rice knew about this possibly as well. Now, I know there are reports out there that she is the one that ordered this. We do not know who reported this because we have not spoken to Devin Nunes about this. He has not at least told us about these things. So we don’t know what papers he saw. Our sources don’t know what papers he saw.

They just tell me the information of unmasking names from Donald Trump and his team and his family was disseminated to a very select few at the top and was done so for a significant amount of time. And that is blockbuster guys. That is, as far as we know, hasn’t been done in modern times. (source)

Additionally, Bloomberg News -Eli Lake- is reporting that President Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice was the person who actually requested the “unmasking” of the individual names.

White House lawyers last month discovered 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.” (link)

This confirms (in part) a report late last night from Mike Cernovich.  Bloomberg’s Eli Lake goes on to outline President Trump’s National Security Council’s senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, as the person who discovered the unmasking requests by Susan Rice.

The evidence outlined by Lake appears to include logs of Rice’s requests to unmask U.S. persons discovered on computer systems within the National Security Council (NSC).

In response to the original concerns expressed by Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, Susan Rice previously said: “I know nothing about this. I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that account today.”

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