The scale to which Obama’s team spied on his successor should be focus of ‘unmasking’

[Dashinka 24,798]

The scale to which Obama’s team spied on his successor should be focus of ‘unmasking’

 

The presumptive Democratic candidate for President Joe Biden heads a list of more than a dozen Obama officials who spied on Donald Trump’s ex-national security advisor Michael Flynn.

Others senior officials include Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and UN ambassador Samantha Power.

A list declassified Tuesday by Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grennel shows that Biden and others asked to have Flynn’s name “unmasked” in transcripts of US intelligence intercepts of foreign officials. The names of US persons or entities incidentally collected by such intercepts are minimized to protect the privacy rights of Americans. Unmasking identities is not in itself not illegal, nor even necessarily improper. Occasionally US policymakers will ask to unmask a US person to better understand the nature of the intelligence before them. Obama officials, however, gorged themselves like children at a candy store.

In an almost two-month period starting election day November 8, 2016, senior US officials made 49 requests to unmask the retired three-star general.
 

https://nypost.com/2020/05/13/the-scale-to-which-obamas-team-spied-should-be-focus-of-unmasking/

[90DayFinancier 910]

Noting that the Post labels the 'Opinion_

[Dashinka 24,798]

46 minutes ago, 90DayFinancier said:

Noting that the Post labels the 'Opinion_

Sure it does.  If you go to the link, it is clearly marked as an opinion piece, and I did not represent it as a news piece in any way.

[Burnt Reynolds 5,058]

It's stomach churning that the government has these powers anyways, regardless of how unsurprising, but it necessitates that if they ever want to keep this power, there needs to be major reforms, no matter how cumbersome, or simply don't possess those powers. One immediate example is contacting every single American citizen and legal resident that gets swept up in communication intercepts, whether incidental or otherwise (with incidentals being rapid notification), so they have every right to challenge the storage of it and force its deletion. It's clear that these incidentals are still stored and transcribed and thus have been used in sabotage efforts like this. There's no reason to be keeping any of it on Americans and legal residents without their knowledge and consent.

Edited May 14, 2020 by Burnt Reynolds

[Dashinka 24,798]

The unmasking of Joe Biden
 

BY JONATHAN TURLEY, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR —  05/14/20 10:00 AM EDT

 

 

The declassification of material from the Michael Flynn case has exposed more chilling details of an effort by prosecutors to come up with a crime to use against the former national security adviser. This week, however, a letter revealed another unsettling detail. Among over three dozen Obama administration officials seeking to “unmask” Flynn in the investigation was former Vice President Joe Biden. This revelation came less than a day after Biden denied any involvement in the investigation of Flynn. It also follows a disclosure that President Obama was aware of that investigation.

For three years, many in the media have expressed horror at the notion of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia to influence the 2016 election. We know there was never credible evidence of such collusion. In recently released transcripts, a long list of Obama administration officials admitted they never saw any evidence of such Russian collusion. That included the testimony of Evelyn Farkas, a former White House adviser who was widely quoted by the media with her public plea for Congress to gather all of the evidence that she learned of as part of the Obama administration.

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Yet none of this matters. A Democratic administration using a secret court to investigate the opposing political campaign does not matter to many in Congress or in the media anyway. An investigation continuing despite the lack of credible information supporting collusion does not matter to them either. A president and a vice president who take personal interest in the surveillance of their political opponents also does not matter.

There was a time, however, when all of this did matter. There was once a time when this would be viewed as the story of the century, including the unmasking of Biden himself in this investigation. But these are not those times, and this cannot be the story. Russian collusion is the story and, as Biden stressed, the rest is just a diversion. It is up to the public to decide who has been ultimately unmasked by the Flynn investigation.

 

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/497711-the-unmasking-of-joe-biden

 

 

Edited May 16, 2020 by Dashinka