Former US Officials Question DOJ’s Probe of ‘Unmasking’ of Trump Ally
Former U.S. intelligence officials questioned the Justice Department’s naming of a prosecutor to probe the “unmasking” of names in spy-agency eavesdropping reports by Obama administration officials, saying such requests…
Former U.S. intelligence officials questioned the Justice Department’s naming of a prosecutor to probe the “unmasking” of names in spy-agency eavesdropping reports by Obama administration officials, saying such requests had not previously been treated as criminal matters.
Attorney General William Barr this week assigned a U.S. attorney in Texas, John Bash, to look into unmasking requests that revealed intercepted conversations between Michael Flynn, a former adviser to Republican President Donald Trump, and Russia’s ambassador had been detailed in National Security Agency reports.
Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about those conversations, though the Justice Department this month moved to drop the charge against him, in what critics call a pattern of providing special treatment to Trump allies.
Key Trump supporters in the Senate, including Lindsey Graham, have seized on unmasking disclosures to demand investigations into requests by aides to former President Barack Obama, months before Trump is expected to face Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, in the November election.
“No one has ever been criminally prosecuted for unmasking. That would be tantamount to pursuing criminal charges against an intelligence analyst for merely doing his job,” said Ned Price, a former CIA analyst who worked for Obama’s National Security Council. “It’s clearly an attempt to cast a patina of criminality around a routine practice,” said Price, who is now a fellow at the New America Foundation and a lecturer at George Washington University.
Unmasking refers to the naming of a U.S. citizen whose identify was blacked out in an NSA report that captured their communications with a foreign national.
The Trump administration has requested far more unmaskings than Obama’s did, according to statistics released last month by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Between September 2015 and August 2016, the figures show 9,217 total requested unmaskings by Obama administration members, compared with 16,721 in calendar year 2018 and 10,012 last year.