Former Obama national security adviser Susan E. Rice said Tuesday that she “absolutely” never sought to uncover “for political purposes” the names of Trump campaign or transition officials concealed in intelligence intercepts, and she called suggestions that she leaked those identities “completely false.”

“I leaked nothing, to nobody, and never have and never would,” Rice said in response to the latest charges and countercharges flowing from politically charged investigations into Russian interference in the presidential election.

Since they were first reported over the weekend, the Rice reports have quickly overtaken the steady drumbeat of revelations about connections to Moscow that have dogged President Trump for months. On Tuesday, the subject dominated cable news and flooded Twitter.

“RICE ORDERED SPY DOCS ON TRUMP?” the president retweeted, with a link to the Daily Caller and a Drudge Report headlined “Boiled Rice.”

A number of Republican lawmakers said that Rice should be called to testify before congressional inquiries into what U.S. intelligence has said were Russian efforts not only to roil the presidential race, but also to tip the scales in Trump’s favor.

“If the reports are right, then she will be of interest to us,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which, along with its House counterpart and the FBI, is investigating the matter.

“When it comes to Susan E. Rice, you need to verify, not trust,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said in an interview with Fox News. “I think every American should know whether or not the national security adviser to President Obama was involved in unmasking Trump transition figures for political purposes.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), called Rice the “Typhoid Mary of the Obama administration.”

Beyond Trump’s tweets, however, the White House was uncharacteristically restrained on the subject, as its media and Capitol Hill allies expressed outrage on its behalf. “It’s not for me to decide who should testify or how they should do it,” press secretary Sean Spicer said.

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called the attention focused on Rice a diversionary tactic. He has also called on the Intelligence Committee’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R), a Trump transition official and fellow Californian, to recuse himself from the investigation. The White House, Schiff said, has a “strong desire . . . that we lose our focus, that we not pursue the investigation of Russia, particularly as it might impact the Trump campaign.”

At the same time, Schiff told CNN, Rice has long been a target of what he called the “Breitbart crowd . . . the hard right” since the September 2012 attacks on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya. Four U.S. officials were killed in an extremist attack that Rice initially described as an anti-American protest that evolved into violence.

White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon is the former chairman of Breitbart News, which he has described as “the platform for the alt-right,” an antiglobalist movement that seeks a whites-only state.

Asked Tuesday whether she was willing to testify, Rice told MSNBC, “Let’s see what comes.” Investigations on “Russian involvement in our electoral process are very important, they’re very serious, and every American ought to have an interest in those investigations going wherever the evidence indicates they should,” she said.

“I have an interest as an American citizen, as a former official,” Rice said. “I would want to be helpful in that process if I could.”

The focus on Rice comes as lawmakers are trying to iron out why Nunes went to the White House two weeks ago to view documents that he later said suggested that the names of Trump transition team members had been improperly “unmasked.” Top officials can ask intelligence agencies to reveal the names to them for national security or other reasons.

The term refers to revealing a name that has been blacked out in an intelligence surveillance report. The law does not permit surveillance of U.S. people without a warrant; if one shows up in authorized surveillance of a foreign person, it is “masked.”

News media reports on contacts between Russia and Trump associates, including in The Washington Post, have included names said to have appeared in intelligence reports — either persons named in conversations between foreigners, or conversations directly between foreigners and U.S. persons.

Most prominent among them is former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, whose ­December phone conversations with Russia’s ambassador in Washington included references to U.S. sanctions imposed under President Barack Obama. After a Post report on the conversations, Trump ousted Flynn for mischaracterizing them to Vice President Pence.

Trump later charged that he, himself, had been surveilled under orders from Obama, who allegedly was seeking to undermine him. The administration has said repeatedly that attention should be focused on who unmasked and leaked, rather than on the information revealed.

After Nunes’s statement about the unmasking, The Post reported last week that at least three White House officials were involved in handling the files shown to him. On Monday, a report by Bloomberg View suggested that those officials began examining the files after discovering that Rice, while working as Obama’s national security adviser, had requested the names be unmasked.

The Daily Caller followed with a report, sourced to former U.S. attorney Joe DiGenova and “other official sources,” that said that Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of phone calls involving Trump and his aides.

The White House immediately drew attention to a PBS interview in which Rice, on the same day as Nunes’s statement about the documents, said, “I know nothing about this.”

Speaking Tuesday to MSNBC, Rice said that she, like other top officials in all administrations, sometimes asked for names of U.S. persons that had been blacked out in intelligence reports — “on every topic under the sun when it seemed relevant” — when necessary to “protect the American people and do our jobs.”

“Let me give you an example — completely made up,” she said. “Let’s say there was a conversation between two foreigners about a conversation they were having about an American who was proposing to sell to them high-tech bomb-making equipment.

“Now, if that came to me as the national security adviser, it would matter enormously — is that some kook sitting in his living room communicating via the Internet to sell something he doesn’t have, or is this a serious person or company or entity with the ability to provide this technology perhaps to an adversary? That would be an example of how it is necessary knowing who that person was to assess that information.”

“I can’t say that the pace of unmasking requests” rose during the Trump transition, Rice said. But, she said, “the pace of intelligence reports on Russian interference efforts increased” beginning in late summer. Intelligence officials went back to rescrub the reports after Obama requested a compilation of them, which was delivered in January, she said.

“There was no spreadsheet, nothing of the sort,” Rice said.

“The allegation is that somehow Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes,” she said. “Absolutely false.”

BEIRUT — Scores of Syrians, many of them women and young children, were killed Tuesday in one of the deadliest chemical attacks of the country’s six-year war, according to doctors, rescue workers and witnesses.

Airstrikes on the northwestern town of Khan Sheikhoun began just after daybreak, delivering an unidentified chemical agent that killed at least 58 people and filled clinics across the area with patients foaming at the mouth or struggling to breathe.

President Trump blamed the attack, which he said was carried out by the Syrian government, on former president Barack Obama, calling it a “consequence” of Obama’s “weakness and irresolution.” The reference was to Obama’s decision not to follow through with a threat to use military force against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after a 2012 chemical attack.

In a statement released by the White House — just days after the administration said action against Assad was not a U.S. priority — Trump called the Tuesday attack “reprehensible” and said that it “cannot be ignored by the civilized world.” At the United Nations, U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley called for an emergency meeting of the Security Council.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring network, put the death toll at 58, including at least 11 children. Doctors at the scene cited higher figures, saying entire families were killed in their sleep.

Three doctors said in interviews that the symptoms they saw were far more serious than they would expect from chlorine, which Syrian government forces have used as a chemical weapon in the past. The Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons expressed “serious concern” and said it was investigating.

Images from the area showed the bodies of at least a dozen men, women and children splayed across the ground between two houses. It was not possible to independently verify the reports, but video footage showed lifeless bodies wrapped in blankets and packed on the back of a truck. The youngest were wearing diapers.

In another video, several children were seen slumped on hospital beds, apparently unresponsive to the medics and chaos around them.

Syrian government warplanes in recent months have launched heavy attacks across northern Idlib province, where hundreds of thousands of civilians — many having fled other battle zones — are squeezed together among much of what remains of the armed opposition to Assad.

[‘The hospitals were slaughterhouses’: A journey into Syria’s secret torture wards]

Syria’s Foreign Ministry denied involvement in Tuesday’s attack, saying the government was committed to its obligations under the international Chemical Weapons Convention. Syria joined the convention in 2013 after launching sarin attacks on several Damascus neighborhoods — strikes that killed hundreds of civilians and pushed the United States to the brink of military intervention.

“Assad calculates, reasonably, that military dynamics play in his favor. By using chemical weapons and other weapons, he is demonstrating the powerlessness of international actors,” said Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Congressional refusal to vote in favor of U.S. military action after Assad’s use of sarin, a nerve agent, in 2012 provided Obama with cover to withdraw his ultimatum, although he continued to call for Assad to leave power. The United States and Russia, Assad’s main backer, then negotiated a plan for the internationally supervised removal of Syria’s chemical weapons stocks.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump criticized Obama for what he said was a waste of attention and resources on Syria’s internal struggle at the expense of the fight against the Islamic State. Late last week, ­Haley said the U.S. priority was no longer to “focus on getting Assad out,” while Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the Syrian people should decide Assad’s future.

A senior State Department official told reporters Tuesday that Assad has committed “war crimes” and blamed his Russian and Iranian backers for failing to control him. Those two countries are “guarantors” of a cease-fire they negotiated, the official said, but “clearly, they are not able to deliver.”

“That’s a very significant problem. Obviously that’ll be something that we’ll be looking at and discussing and reviewing,” said the official, who noted that Tillerson will visit Moscow this month. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity under rules set by the State Department.

The attack came as European diplomats gathered in Brussels for a flagship conference aimed at pledging billions of dollars for Syria’s reconstruction, six years into a civil conflict that has shattered much of the country and prompted refugees to pour out across the Middle East and Europe.

Photographs of lifeless bodies in Khan Sheikhoun were passed from phone to phone in the Brussels conference hall, attendees said, a stark reminder of the limitations of European power in a war now heavily driven by Iranian and Russian influence. 

In Washington, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) echoed Trump’s criticism of Obama, saying that the former president had “figuratively jumped in [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s lap” to agree on the weapons withdrawal.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said that “Assad believes he can commit war crimes with impunity,” and he challenged Trump to take action. The question now confronting Washington, he said, “is whether we will take any action to disabuse him of this murderous notion.” 

[Syrian defector comes to Washington after documenting atrocities]

Doctors and activists in rebel-held areas have accused the government of sharply increasing chemical attacks across Idlib, Aleppo and Hama provinces since the end of last year.

In the Khan Sheikhoun attack, Samer al-Youssef, a resident, described watching people running toward the homes of relatives, then wrenching open the doors to find them dead inside.

“We did our best, but we couldn’t save people. Around 30 percent of those who were brought to us were dead on arrival,” said Usama Darwish, a doctor.

Although a nationwide cease-fire has technically been in place across Syria since late December, civilians and rebel groups now say it exists in name only. 

“People are terrified. They don’t know where to go,” said Ahmad Rahhal, a 22-year-old activist. “They can’t cross into Turkey because the borders are closed, but if they stay in their houses, they will be attacked by bombs. What can they do?”

As a displacement crisis burgeons on its southern border, Turkey has limited new Syrian arrivals to those seeking medical treatment, often in the wake of attacks. Reports Tuesday suggested that ambulances were lined up at the border crossing, ready to bring the next wave of casualties to Turkish hospitals.

Zakaria Zakaria in Istanbul, Heba Habib in Stockholm and William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.

Read more:

Syrian forces used gas to help retake Aleppo, says Human Rights Watch

Even after so many deaths, chemical attack in Syria provoked visceral response

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

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