Fox News judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano said Susan Rice “is trying to rewrite history” after it was revealed that former President Obama’s national security adviser sent what two senior Republican senators described as an “unusual” email to herself on President Trump’s Inauguration Day.
“She’s obviously trying to rewrite history. She’s trying to make it look as if something happened that didn’t happen,” said Napolitano in an interview on “Fox & Friends” early Tuesday.
{mosads}”So you are a juror in a courtroom and you learn that an event occurred on January 5th and one of the people at the event 16 days later decides to write a memo summarizing what happened at the event,” the former New Jersey Superior Court judge continued.
“She writes the memo after Barack Obama is out of office, it’s 12:15 in the afternoon, his term ended 15 minutes earlier, after she no longer had a job. My suspicion, and I think Senator Graham shares this as well, is that they learned something between January 5th and January 20th which caused them to want to change the narrative about this meeting,” Napolitano said.
“None of us knew about the meeting, there’s no reason for anyone to know about the meeting, it’s a private, secret meeting in the Oval Office. Suddenly word comes out. And why would ‘by the book’ be in quotations? Who would believe this?” Napolitano asked in conclusion.
The commentary comes after Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a panel member, questioned Rice’s motives around sending herself an email regarding a discussion she observed on Jan. 5, 2017, between then-FBI Director James Comey and Obama.
“The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would ‘by the book,’ ” Rice wrote in the email.
“It strikes us as odd that, among your activities in the final moments on the final day of the Obama administration, you would feel the need to send yourself such an unusual email purporting to document a conversation involving President Obama and his interactions with the FBI regarding the Trump/Russia investigation,” Grassley and Graham wrote in a letter to Rice.
Graham and Grassley also asked if Rice had any knowledge about an application to obtain a surveillance warrant on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page at the time she sent the email.
Former Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, who’s now representing Rice, said there was nothing unusual about the national security adviser “memorializing an important discussion for the record.”
“The Obama White House was justifiably concerned about how comprehensive they should be in their briefings regarding Russia to members of the Trump transition team, particularly Lt. General Michael Flynn, given the concerning communications between him and Russian officials,” Ruemmler said in a statement, referring to Trump’s first national security adviser, who resigned last February after reports he misled senior White House officials about his conversations with Russians.
“The discussion that Ambassador Rice documented did not involve the so-called Steele dossier,” she added, noting a controversial document used to obtain a warrant to spy on Page.
“Any insinuation that Ambassador Rice’s actions in this matter were inappropriate is yet another attempt to distract and deflect from the importance of the ongoing investigations into Russian meddling in America’s democracy,” Ruemmler said.
Updated at 12:08 p.m.