Russians? McFarlane says Rice briefings covered everything else

FPI / May 21, 2020

On Jan. 20, 2017, President Donald Trump's inauguration day, then-national security adviser Susan Rice sent a note to herself (which was declassified in its entirety this week by acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell) showing that then-FBI Director James Comey suggested to President Barack Obama in a January 2017 meeting that the National Security Council [NSC] might not want to pass "sensitive information related to Russia" to then-incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn.

“Susan Rice wrote to herself and she’s saying, ‘Comey said that there’s nothing that Flynn has done yet to pass classified information to the Russians, but maybe he might in the future,’ ” former Trump administration deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland told Fox News on Tuesday.

McFarland pointed out that during the January 2017 meeting, which was documented in Rice's email, “She [Rice] says that President Obama said, ‘Is there any reason why we shouldn’t bring the new team in on what we’re doing with Russia?’ As if that decision was being made then.”

McFarland said that, three weeks before the meeting, she and Flynn were in Rice’s office for handover briefings and “every other topic was mentioned” including North Korea, China and ISIS, “but they didn’t mention anything about Russia and yet they knew, at that point, that they were about to sanction Russia for election interference.”

“So none of it really [jibes] unless you look at it from the perspective of they knew they had done something wrong and now they were trying to cover their tracks,” McFarland told "Fox News @Night" host Shannon Bream.

McFarland said that “on its face” nothing about Rice's email makes sense.

“Why would you write a memorandum to the record for yourself unless you assumed that somebody was going to come and look for those clues, that somebody was potentially going to come after the fact and see that they’ve done something wrong,” McFarland said.

“There are a lot of pieces in this puzzle and they’re all starting to come together and more will be declassified this week and next week and you’ll have an even bigger picture of what it is,” McFarland said.

In a statement Tuesday evening about the email's release, a representative for Rice insisted the Obama administration did not change the way it briefed Flynn.

Bream asked McFarland if she thinks the Obama administration changed the way it briefed her or Flynn.

“Absolutely,” McFarland said, explaining that during the transition period Flynn met with Rice three times, two of which McFarland was also present “and in none of those meetings did they discuss Russia.”

“I think they had decided early on, for whatever their reasons were, they were not going to share any information about the Russians,” McFarland said.

Free Press International