Trump, Citing No Evidence, Suggests Susan Rice Committed Crime

WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Wednesday that Susan E. Rice, the former national security adviser, may have committed a crime by seeking to learn the identities of Trump associates swept up in surveillance of foreign officials by United States spy agencies, repeating an assertion his allies in the news media have been making since last week.

Mr. Trump gave no evidence to support his claim, and current and former intelligence officials from both Republican and Democratic administrations have said they do not believe Ms. Rice’s actions were unusual or unlawful. The president repeatedly rebuffed attempts by two New York Times reporters to learn more about what led him to the conclusion, saying he would talk more about it “at the right time.”

The allegation by a sitting president was a remarkable escalation — and, his critics say, the latest effort to change the story at a time when his nascent administration has been consumed by questions about any role his associates may have played in a Russian campaign to disrupt last year’s presidential election.

Since March 4, when Mr. Trump posted on Twitter that President Barack Obama had “wiretapped” him at Trump Tower during the campaign, the president and his allies have repeatedly sought evidence trying to corroborate that claim, despite flat denials from James B. Comey, the director of the F.B.I., and other senior intelligence officials.

Wednesday’s interview revealed how Mr. Trump seizes on claims made by the conservative news media, from fringe outlets to Fox News, and gives them a presidential stamp of approval and also increases their reach.

Last week, some Republican television commentators asserted that Ms. Rice had improperly leaked the names of Trump associates picked up in surveillance of foreign officials. On Sunday, a conservative writer and conspiracy theorist reported, without identifying his sources, that Ms. Rice had been the one to seek identities of the Trump associates.

Other conservative outlets picked up the report, and the Drudge Report website, which has been supportive of Mr. Trump, featured the story prominently. White House officials then accused mainstream news outlets of not giving the story proper coverage.

The interview with The Times was supposed to be focused on Mr. Trump’s plans for large-scale spending on the nation’s infrastructure. But moments after it began, the president began talking about Ms. Rice.

“I think the Susan Rice thing is a massive story. I think it’s a massive, massive story. All over the world,” Mr. Trump said.

“It’s a bigger story than you know,” the president added cryptically, also saying that new information would emerge “in terms of what other people have done also.”

“The Russia story is a total hoax. There has been absolutely nothing coming out of that,” he said.

Turning the subject to Ms. Rice, the president said: “What’s happened is terrible. I’ve never seen people so indignant, including many Democrats who are friends of mine.”

Through a spokeswoman, Ms. Rice said, “I’m not going to dignify the president’s ludicrous charge with a comment.” In an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday, Ms. Rice said she had done nothing wrong.

“The allegation is that somehow the Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes,” Ms. Rice said. “That’s absolutely false.”

Normally, when Americans are swept up in surveillance of foreign officials by intelligence agencies, their identities are supposed to be obscured. But they can be revealed — or “unmasked” — for national security reasons, and intelligence officials say it is a regular occurrence and completely legal for a national security adviser to request the identities of Americans who are mentioned in intelligence reports.

Intelligence officials said any requests that Ms. Rice made would have had to be granted by the intelligence agency that produced the report. In most cases, that would likely have been the National Security Agency, which is responsible for electronic surveillance of foreign officials.

“Requests to learn the identity of a U.S. person were not routine, but also not uncommon,” said Stephen Slick, a retired C.I.A. official who served as the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council under President George W. Bush.

Requesting that a name be revealed so that officials could “make sense of an intelligence report was a normal part of the daily intelligence rhythm at the White House, State Department, Defense Department and other national security agencies,” added Mr. Slick, who is now the director of the Intelligence Studies Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

It could be a crime if Ms. Rice leaked the name of any American wrapped up in the surveillance net, but she flatly denied doing so in her MSNBC interview.

“I leaked nothing to nobody, and never have and never would,” Ms. Rice said.

The broader issue of how intelligence collected by the national security apparatus is disseminated and used has long been an animating issue for civil libertarians, a point that Mr. Trump made in the interview.

Revelations about American programs for intercepting and mining private data made by Edward J. Snowden, a government contractor, proved deeply embarrassing for the Obama administration in 2013.

Mr. Trump declined to say whether he would be willing to declassify some of the information that has been at issue. He also did not explain what he believed was unlawful in his estimation.

It is not the first time Mr. Trump has made a provocative allegation without providing supporting evidence. One of the most notorious instances of this was his yearslong claim that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States.

Like his statements about Mr. Obama — which he walked away from late in the 2016 presidential campaign — Mr. Trump’s claims about Ms. Rice have taken hold in the conservative news media, where she has been a target ever since her press appearances after the terrorist attack on a diplomatic outpost in Libya in September 2012.

Mr. Trump’s March 4 Twitter message came after reports in conservative news outlets — including Breitbart, the website once run by the president’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon — claiming that there had been surveillance of some kind against Mr. Trump when he was a candidate.

Mr. Trump was widely criticized for the intemperate post, and he began to ask his advisers about how he might be able to investigate the issue.

Weeks later, Representative Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters that he had learned of new information that Trump associates may have been surveilled in some way. He rushed to the White House to brief the president, even though it was later revealed that the information had come from White House officials.

Representative Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, cast Mr. Trump’s comments as part of a broader effort by the president to distract from the investigations into Russia’s interference in the election. The committee is running one of the investigations.

“He began by accusing President Obama of a crime without any evidence,” Mr. Schiff said. “He’s now moved on to accusing Susan Rice of a crime without any evidence, and this is sadly how this president operates.”

It “would be a terrible way to do business,” Mr. Schiff added. “It’s a worse way to run a country.”