Recently, Eli Lake's Bloomberg article caused politicos' heads to spin. It began: 

White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter. The pattern of Rice’s requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on “unmasking” the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like “U.S. Person One.”

The mainstream media didn't waste one second. Immediately, they began broadcasting "news reports" that basically could be summed up by "Move along, there's nothing to see here." One of the more notable "segments" was Anderson Cooper interviewing Jim Sciutto:

Wow. Sounds like this is all just a big misunderstanding. But Ace of Spades reports that there's more than meets the eye:

On Monday, CNN's Jim Sciutto dismissed Bloomberg's scoop on Susan Rice as "largely ginned up, partly as a distraction from this larger investigation." However, the journalist failed to mention that he has a connection to the key figure in this story, as he once worked at the State Department during the Obama administration between 2011 and 2013.

This means that Sciutto and Rice both worked for the Obama White House. During the same time period, Rice was serving as President Barack Obama‘s ambassador to the United Nations.

The journalist’s connection to Rice goes beyond the Obama administration, as RedState pointed out in a Tuesday post. Before he joined the State Department, Sciutto worked at ABC. During his time at the Big Three network, one of his colleagues was Ian Cameron, who happens to be married to Susan Rice.

You'd think CNN would require that Sciutto disclose those personal relationships, right? Well, they didn't. Note that Sciutto's "reporting" had a lot of anonymous sources, whom he describes as "source close to Rice." Could that be Sciutto's old colleague and Susan Rice's husband? More from Ace of Spades:

If that's the case, why is his name being withheld? A husband faces no liability or threat of retaliation for standing up for his wife.

No, if the source for his "Susan's a perfect innocent in all this" "reporting" is Rice's husband, then that name is being made anonymous to give it additional credence -- no one would put any stock in a husband vouching for a wife.

Anyway, this possibility underscores the need for Sciutto's connections to Rice and to the Obama State Department to be frequently disclosed, his "reporting" scrutinized to make sure he's not disguising the names of his "sources" for non-journalistically defensible reasons, and for him to be barred from offering opinion editorial commentary on the story.

If he's got a direct line to the Rice household, fine, that makes him a conduit for Rice's spin, which CNN should use.

The bottom line is that the mainstream media is never going to hold liberal political leaders to any standards. They exist not as watchdogs for the federal government, but as echo chambers, saying whatever talking points the Democrats want disseminated that day. Ironically, I should point out, Anderson Cooper called the Sciutto segment "Keeping Them Honest."