ELECTIONS
Five More Things You Probably Didn’t Know about Susan Rice
By FRED FLEITZ
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/ ... usan-rice/
August 7, 2020
Susan Rice speaks at a Center for American Progress conference in Washington, D.C., 2017. (Aaron Bernstein/Reuters)
Ineptitude is the theme that runs throughout her diplomatic and national-security career.
Joe Biden is reportedly considering Barack Obama’s former national-security adviser Susan Rice to be his running mate. National Review’s Jim Geraghty recently told us “20 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Susan Rice.” https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/ ... about-her/
I worked with Rice during the Clinton administration and have five more things the public needs to know.
1. Rice was obsessed with U.N. peacekeeping to solve world conflicts. Rice was a key architect of a disastrous Clinton-administration policy — Presidential Decision Directive 25. PDD-25, as the document was called, sought to implement “assertive multilateralism” to address all global conflicts with U.N. peacekeepers. This concept, the brainchild of Rice’s mentor Madeleine Albright, former ambassador to the United Nations, rested on the assumption that due to the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and U.N. peacekeepers could be used to address global conflicts instead of U.S. troops. PDD-25 was so radical that at one point an early draft advocated giving the U.N. the ability to tax international phone calls to pay for new peacekeeping missions. Assertive multilateralism was a spectacular failure since it led to the deployment of lightly armed, often poorly disciplined U.N. peacekeepers in war zones such as Bosnia, Haiti, Liberia, and Somalia, where many were killed or taken hostage.
2. Rice disliked hearing opposing views. As part of my duties as a CIA analyst covering U.N. issues, I briefed Susan Rice on classified and unclassified information related to her job. It was clear that she was not interested in — and objected to — hearing intelligence that contradicted her personal views. She and her NSC boss Richard Clarke were determined to ram through PDD-25 and tried to silence officers from other government agencies (including myself) who expressed skepticism about deploying U.N. peacekeepers to war zones and civil wars. Rice also made clear to me that she did not want to hear about U.N. waste and corruption. During the one occasion when I tried to brief her on an incident of serious U.N. corruption, she cut me off by saying,
Her point was she did not care how much money the U.N. wasted because she believed the U.S. government wasted more.Do you know how much a B-1 bomber costs?
3. Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice did not get along because Rice refused to abide by the State Department’s chain of command. There were many reasons for tension between then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Rice, who at that time was U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Rice had been a close adviser to Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Clinton ran against him. Obama gave Clinton the post of secretary of state, but the two were not close. Rice, on the other hand, received the plum job of ambassador to the U.N., maintained her close relationship with Obama, and was given cabinet rank equal to that of Clinton. Rice’s tendency to go around Clinton and the State bureaucracy to work directly with the White House caused considerable tension with the secretary of state and her staff. A State Department officer who worked with Rice in the 1990s told me that the relationship between Clinton and Rice and their staffs was
While it’s easy to understand why anyone would have poisonous relations with Hillary Clinton, this high-stakes history raises questions as to whether Rice would assume the proper back-set role of a vice president under Joe Biden, or whether she would seek to usurp the mentally declining presidential nominee and use him as a Trojan horse to make herself de facto president in terms of foreign policy and national security.poisonous.
4. Rice, not Clinton, took the fall for the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi because Clinton outsmarted her. One of the low points of Susan Rice’s career was when she appeared on five Sunday-morning talk shows on September 16, 2012, and made several inaccurate claims about the attack five days before on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the death of U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens and others. Rice’s disastrous conduct included making the widely discredited, false claim that the attack was in response to an obscure anti-Muslim video and was not a pre-planned act of jihadist terrorism intended to coincide with the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks on the United States. Rice received so much criticism for these farcical interviews that they scuttled her bid to be nominated to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. Geraghty quoted an unnamed Obama official who said Rice’s interviews were
From my own experience, I believe this was the case. It’s also important to note how unusual it was for the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. to do these sensitive interviews instead of the secretary of state. Clinton declined to respond when invited, almost certainly because she knew that such an interview was a hopeless assignment. She also did not warn Rice — effectively letting her rival walk into this media trap. Rice’s mother, Lois Dickson Rice, realized https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... ghazi.html this before the interviews and told her daughter:dishonest and driven by ego.
Clinton’s outmaneuvering of the egotistical and intemperate Rice on the Benghazi interviews raises serious questions about how Rice would fare in dealing with wily and [ deleted ] U.S. adversaries such as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un, especially since she could be running U.S. foreign policy as vice president with Biden’s mental decline.Why do you have to go on the shows? Where is Hillary? I smell a rat.
5. Rice was a key player in the Clinton administration’s bungling of African conflicts and genocide. Geraghty recounts how Rice suggested during a teleconference that the U.S. government should not use the term “genocide” to describe the 1994 massacre of about 800,000 ethnic Tutsis in Rwanda because of the effect this term could have on the 1994 midterm election. I worked on related issues for the CIA at the time and remember the CIA being pressured not to call these killings genocide. While I don’t doubt that Rice made this argument, I remember other Clinton officials also said this at the time. Rice and other Clinton loyalists also prevented the U.N. from taking any action in Rwanda — contrary to what Rice would have argued in PDD-25 — because they feared it would play into the hands of congressional Republicans who had harshly criticized the Clinton administration’s series of U.N. peacekeeping fiascos.
Rice also has been accused of condoning an invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo led by Rwanda and supported by Uganda in the late 1990s. In response to concerns about this intervention in Congo and reports of genocide, Howard W. French, a former correspondent for the New York Times, wrote https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/opin ... spots.html that Rice said,
Geraghty wrote that Rice’s mishandling of Rwanda and Congo continued during the Obama administration, when shethe only thing we have to do is look the other way.
Although Rice later expressed regret over her poor judgment on the 1994 Rwanda genocide, she played a central role in two other major African humanitarian catastrophes. Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens wrote https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424 ... 0748123040 in 2012 that Rice tried to mediate a peace agreement in 1998 between Ethiopia and Eritrea, its former province. After she announced a final peace plan that Eritrea had not agreed to, the peace talks broke down and each country bombed the other’s capital. This was such a diplomatic disaster that Rice reportedly was summoned back to Washington andsoftened the U.S. response to mass killings in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and [Rwandan President Paul] Kagame’s support of violent rebel forces.
by a furious Secretary of State Albright.put on probation
According to Stephens,
Rice also played a central role in an absurd and deadly peace plan in Sierra Leone that released a psychotic rebel leader named Foday Sankoh from prison and made him Sierra Leone’s vice president under the Lome Agreement of 1999. Sankoh’s rebel group, the RUF, which had a reputation for mass rapes and amputations, was given amnesty for all crimes. The agreement resulted in a catastrophe because Sankoh immediately began to reorganize his rebel force after he was released from prison and his fighters resumed killing and maiming civilians. The RUF refused to allow a U.N. peacekeeping force into rebel-held areas and took 500 peacekeepers hostage. The Clinton administration was afraid to resolve the disaster, so the U.N. turned to the United Kingdom, the former colonial power. British troops routed the RUF and arrested Sankoh. A fragile democracy was created in the country, and it endures today. Former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair is regarded as a hero in Sierra Leone for ousting Sankoh and his bloodthirsty thugs.an estimated 100,000 people would perish in the war that Ms. Rice so ineptly failed to end.
It is hard to imagine that any national-security official who played a role in just one of these humanitarian disasters would ever serve in government again. But Susan Rice is a Democrat and the mainstream media will never hold her accountable.
Rice’s career shows over 20 years of bad judgment and ill-informed policy positions that have damaged U.S. national security and contributed to humanitarian disasters and genocide.
Rice as vice president under a doddering President Biden could be a recipe for national-security chaos and disaster.
FRED FLEITZ, president of the Center for Security Policy, served in 2018 as deputy assistant to the president and to the chief of staff of the National Security Council. He previously held national-security jobs with the CIA, the DIA, the Department of State, and the House Intelligence Committee staff. Fleitz is the author of the 2002 book PEACEKEEPING FIASCOES OF THE 1990S. Twitter: @fredfleitz.
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ELECTIONS 2020
Progressives alarmed by Rice's vast financial investments
The multimillionaire VP finalist bought into the company that owns the Keystone XL pipeline project — and many other Democratic Party villains.
Susan Rice speaks at a conference. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
By MARC CAPUTO and CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/0 ... nts-392507
08/07/2020
When Susan Rice was under consideration for secretary of state in 2012, she was attacked by environmentalists for holding stock in the controversial Keystone Pipeline XL deal.
Now, with the multimillionaire Rice in contention to be Joe Biden’s running mate, that investment is again drawing fire from progressives. They say her extensive past holdings in an array of industries at odds with liberal causes — particularly the Keystone investment — could make her ill-suited to be vice president in a Democratic administration.
said Julian NoiseCat, a vice president for the advocacy group Data for Progress who formerly worked for the environmentalist group 350.org. He noted that Biden opposes the Keystone project and is campaigning on a $1.7 trillion climate-change plan. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/ ... an-1352663It raises my eyebrows to think the potential vice president of the United States would have financial ties, whether present or historical, that are exactly opposed 180 degrees to the president,
NoiseCat said, echoing other activists.It makes them look like hypocrites,
If elected vice president, Rice would be the first Black woman ever to hold the office and the first in modern times to have never run for elected office before. Because she’s never been put through the crucible of a campaign as a candidate, Rice hasn’t had to publicly disclose her policy views, at least on domestic issues, over the years. But she was required to reveal her financial portfolio for the years in appointed office in the Obama administration.
Rice later lamented that her Keystone investment became a problem https://www.politico.com/story/2012/11/ ... ock-084355 during her unsuccessful bid for secretary of state in 2012.
At the time, Rice’s financial disclosures showed that she and her husband — scion of a wealthy Canadian family — owned as much as $600,000 worth of stock in TransCanada, the company that owned Keystone. She held stock in TransCanada and other fossil fuel companies for the entire eight years she served in the Obama Administration.
said Yasmine Taeb, senior policy counsel at Demand Progress.The financial disclosure reports reflect at worst a conflict of interest, and at best, an indifference to a perception of a conflict of interest,
A survey http://filesforprogress.org/memos/progr ... olling.pdf conducted for the progressive think tank Data for Progress concerning Biden’s appointments showedIt's troubling to see that Susan Rice has invested in so many companies that fuel climate change and in entities at odds with Democratic values.
NoiseCat said.voters don’t want folks who have strong financial ties and backgrounds in corporate business running their government,
A Rice spokeswoman would not comment on whether she still holds stock in the company that owns Keystone.
Progressive activists have started circulating dossiers among themselves that raise concerns about Rice’s holdings and foreign policy record. Left-wing Democrats — many of whom favor Rep. Karen Bass for VP — also said in interviews this week that they worried about the toll of recent critical stories examining the California congresswoman’s statements and record and complained that Rice had yet to face similar scrutiny.
Rice’s first financial disclosure http://www.disclosures.org/wp-content/u ... ominee.pdf as an Obama White House official, filed in 2008, formed a parade of horribles for progressives. Her investments ranged from fossil fuels and large financial institutions to pharmaceuticals and holdings in Las Vegas casinos owned by the Republican megadonors Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn.
Rice had so many investments that a full analysis of her assets was only publicly released once, in 2009, by the Center for Responsive Politics. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2012/1 ... candidate/ It estimated she was worth between $23.5 million and $43.5 million.
The TransCanada investment stands out from the others owing to the project’s political significance.
Despite the controversy surrounding the TransCanada investment in 2012, Rice clung to the stock and listed as much as $100,000 of it in her last public financial disclosure https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000173 ... 57d23a0000 as she exited the White House in 2017 as national security advisor. She was appointed to that post after John Kerry beat her out as secretary of state in the aftermath of her handling https://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/ ... tes-101462 of the attacks on the lethal attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Though Benghazi was more of a political liability for Rice than TransCanada at the time, her entire stock portfolio was part of an internal whisper campaign to undermine her chances, according to a Democratic official who recalled the behind-the-scenes jockeying.
A Rice spokeswoman would not discuss her investments or whether Rice shared her latest holdings with the Biden campaign.
the spokeswoman said, adding that the former ambassador filed financial disclosures as required throughout her tenure in the Obama administration.We are not going to comment on the vetting process,
A Washington-raised Rhodes Scholar, Rice earlier in her career worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Co. and served in the Clinton Administration as well.Ambassador Rice is still a private citizen and will disclose her holdings if and when required by law and a return to service.
In her 2019 book, “Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For,” Rice wrote about how she pushed back on negative media coverage of her TransCanada investments during her consideration for secretary of state. In a chapter titled “Benghazi,” Rice noted that her detractors argued at the time that the financial holdings she shared with her husband, including in the Canadian oil pipeline company, should disqualify her from seeking the top diplomatic post, since it fell to the State Department to advise President Obama on whether to approve the pipeline.
Rice dismissed the criticism.
Rice wrote,This was a particular red herring,
as all I would have needed to do was recuse myself, which I did as national security advisor.
Critics of Rice’s finances said they didn’t forget.
Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb, founder and president of the anti-pipeline group Bold Nebraska, said the project remains a driving issue in her state because it pits
the working-class people rising up against big corporations and the people helping those big corporations.
Kleeb said.If you’re a Democratic Party leader and you’re still invested in oil and gas it’s just a problem,
Evan Weber, a cofounder and political director of the Sunrise Movement group, which is advocating for the Green New Deal, said thatWe know so much more about the impact of climate change on our land and our water. It’s just not acceptable anymore. We don’t look the other way anymore … We can’t sweep it under the rug.
He added,Rice’s investments were certainly concerning at the time, not just in Keystone XL, but in oil and gas companies and projects across the board.
Activism around climate change has grown considerably since Obama first took office. Leading environmental organizations at nearly every level of government have developed pledges they urge politicians to sign promising that they won’t accept more than $200 from oil, gas, and coal industry executives, lobbyists, and PACs. The candidates must instead agree to prioritize the health of people and the climate over corporate profits.We would hope that by now, she would join the tens of thousands of individuals, and over 1,200 institutions who have divested from the fossil fuel industry to the tune of nearly $15 trillion.
Janet Redman, climate campaign director at Greenpeace, said the organization would seek swift assurances from Rice if she’s Biden’s VP pick.
Redman said,It’s really incumbent on her,
to reassure the electorate that she is no longer benefiting from companies that are hell-bent on destroying the planet.
