suzanne rice, is this business as usual? or was there something controversial about how the name of someone on team trump got out into the public sphere? >> there is unusual or alarming here. but that's why we need the senate intelligence committee to work well, to work hard and to work in a bipartisan way. there were also allegations earlier this week that the uae set up a back panel between a putin crony and the founder of black water. there is more and more black smoke that we can keep track of. we need a solid bipartisan investigation of all the different allegations on this. and an important point here is the white house keeps trying to find some way to justify president trump's tweet from a month ago that he had been wiretapped. i don't think this provides any sort of cover for that. and given the very important developments this week, president trump's meetings with the president of egypt, with the king of jordan, with the president of china, this isn't reality tv anymore. this is no time for twitter d t diplomacy. >>

so at this point you don't know if suzanne rice is going to come before the committee? >> i'm sure she will be invited, as will others. but again i think one point that we're trying to keep in mind and that is the real focus of our investigation is on the trump connections to russia, the u.s. response to the russian hacking, russian's involvement not only in our own election but in that of our european allies and we are not going to lose focus on that, no matter how much cloud and dust is thrown in our way. we look into issues of minimalization, but we are not going to let the white house or anyone us distract us from our core focus. >> a unique challenge when the chairman of your own committee was doing that. >> can i make one other point on that subject? >> please. >> the white house clearly only wanted one person to see these documents, and that person was our chairman. it reluctantly had to allow myself to view it and the chair and ranking on senate intel. now i want the full committees to be able to see that, and we're meeting resistance. if these documents are so

the fact is let's set suzanne rice's response aside. i have spoken to senior u.s. intelligence officials and served both republican and democratic associations. they say, one, unmasking is not unusual. they do that to better understand the information they receive behind intelligence reports every day. it is not illegal. there are protocols to allow this to happen. and it can't happen on the orders of one official. you have to ask the intelligence officials for permission to unmask those names and it is the intelligence committee that makes a judgment as to whether that is appropriate. and these requests are meticulously logged. and finally unmasking does not mean revealing or leaking. that is shared between the briefer and the national security intelligence official. what we don't know is were those identities unmasked and then leeked by rice or others. we don't know that. it is possible. but with the information we have right now, we don't know that to be true. that seems to be what the trump administration and officials and devin nunes or others are equating her

but it was president obama or his chief of staff, if suzanne rice asked for it in order to understand the information. when she asked for the unmasking, who is this american citizen, let's assume that it is about mike flynn, she hears that flynn is talking to someone about the election, she doesn't know at that moment that citizen 1, citizen a is a trump person. so the idea that she's unmasking trump tepeople, no they're unmasking themselves because they're talking with people under foreign national security wiret wiretap. >> you're not arguing that it was inappropriate for susan rice or some senior official to request someone be unmasked in order to understand. what you're arguing is, how did they use that information? are they then using it for political purposes by leaking it, is that correct? >> i'm actually arguing both. look, the unmasking is not a crime, but these names are masked for a reason, because frivolous unmasking is a backdoor to domestic surveillance. >> but you don't know whether it's frivolous or not. >> but we shouldn't jump to the conclusion, i think the other pan