Nearly a Decade Later, the Unmasking Scandal Comes Full Circle

VINDICATION? Above, former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice. Below, President’s Intelligence Advisory Board chief Devin Nunes.

Last week, when Donald Trump’s Justice Department released notes of an FBI interview with a “whistleblower” from the Democratic staff of the House Intelligence Committee, the few media outlets to seriously cover the story focused on a grave accusation: then-Congressman Adam Schiff approved leaks of classified information in 2017 as a way “topple” the Trump administration. The document, which seemed to confirm mention of a “Committee Witness” in an Inspector General’s report last year, triggered heated denials from Schiff and fellow Democrat Eric Swalwell, who seethed that the only “real criminals” in Washington were in the White House.

Few noticed another passage deep in the report, in which the Democratic staffer described efforts to “unmask” identities of figures in Trump’s orbit. Typically, the names of Americans swept up in monitoring of suspected foreign terrorists or criminals are anonymized, and transcripts of their conversations are only available to non-intelligence personnel upon request from high-level officials. The whistleblower suggested these “unmasking” techniques had been abused by members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, or HPSCI:

HPSCI personnel contacted [redacted] and [redacted] and requested the number of documents the agencies had related to President Trump. The staff wanted to know how many of these documents were masked. They planned to request the unmasking of the individuals and then deal with them.

The report contains other mentions of efforts by “HPSCI attorneys” to unmask the identities of unnamed figures. It’s theoretically possible that the staffer was referring in certain places to actions by Republican HPSCI staffers, but it’s unlikely that’s the case throughout, especially in the above passage. Either way, there’s reason some of the Republicans who originally looked at this issue saw in that release a piece of overdue vindication, after being denounced for investigating these very practices nearly a decade ago.

Former House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes in 2017 was forced to recuse himself from the Russia investigation when Democrats launched a House Ethics Committee probe in response to his unmasking claims. Nunes was cleared later, but damage was done: investigation into Obama-era abuses of foreign surveillance programs ground to a near-halt, as everyone from the Washington Post to Talking Points Memo lambasted the “completely fake and stupid unmasking conspiracy theory.”

Over the years, however, evidence surfaced suggesting abuse claims were anything but conspiracy theory, and that Nunes was correct to raise an alarm about misuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) program. Although a Trump-appointed Special Counsel, John Bash, issued a report finding no evidence of misuse of unmasking procedures for political purposes, Trump-Russia investigators in both the Senate and the House have long believed there was more to the story, and that Bash’s report ignored significant evidence of corruption. “Not gonna lie. The Bash thing was a gut punch for us,” is how one former Republican Senate aide put it. “It sucked.”

Now the unmasking story is back in the investigative picture. According to a Justice Department spokesperson, the FISA court in June unsealed more Carter Page materials for oversight purposes, giving Russiagate investigators new documents to examine. Along with last week’s FBI whistleblower release, hopes have been reignited that the issue of using FISA to spy on Americans for political reasons will finally be re-examined, after a nearly decade-long delay.

“We pushed for years for transparency and accountability for the Russia hoax and were continually disappointed,” a Nunes-era HPSCI staffer told Racket. “But right now, some of us are feeling a strange sense of optimism that we’re not used to.”

After a post-Congressional sojourn as the CEO of Truth Social, Nunes is back in government, heading Trump’s Intelligence Advisory Board. If he’s vindicated on unmasking, it wouldn’t be his first belated victory. In February 2018, after release of the so-called “Nunes memo” put together by then-investigator Kash Patel accusing the FBI of lying to the FISA court, Patel and especially Nunes were denounced as conspiracist rogues in the most abject terms. Nancy Pelosi claimed his “dishonest” actions and “bogus memo” so “disgraced” the House that he needed to step down. The Washington Post agreed, calling the memo’s release “Trump’s most unethical act.” Former CIA chief John Brennan, who set historic standards for cherry-picking in his construction of the 2017 Intelligence Assessment on Russian meddling, railed against the “cherry-picked” document, saying the “appalling” Nunes “abused the office of the Chairman”: [video at link]

A little over a year later, though, the Barack Obama-appointed Inspector General of the Justice Department, Michael Horowitz, published a 400-page report supporting all of Nunes’ major claims, forcing even the Washington Post to admit there was “vindication.” Will a similar adjustment to conventional wisdom now take place with regard to the requests by Obama White House officials like former National Security Adviser Susan Rice to unmask the identities of Trump figures for dubious reasons? There are new reasons to believe that’s the case.

The “unmasking” controversy far predates Donald Trump and Russiagate. Official attempts to “unmask” identities of politicians captured in foreign intelligence monitoring had once been a bright red line for American liberalism. When John Bolton was nominated by Bush to serve as Ambassador to the United Nations, Democrats balked. As Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security in Bush’s first term, Bolton asked to unmask the names of Americans swept up in FISA intercepts 10 times in four years. Connecticut’s Chris Dodd said unmasking should be “rarely requested,” and “infrequently… [by] non-career political appointees such as Mr. Bolton.”

“Bolton Should Step Aside,” yelped the Los Angeles Times, while the New York Times denounced the “incorrigibly secretive” Bush administration. Here’s none other than future President Joe Biden, then a Senator from Delaware, denouncing “the nerve” of the Bush administration to deny leaders of the Senate information given not just to Bolton, but to Bolton’s staff. “This is just strong-arm, man,” Biden snapped: [video at link]

In the Obama years there were more questions about improper use of surveillance tools. The noisiest involved reports of the White House listening to French and German leaders, but there were domestic cases, too. A December 29, 2015, article by Adam Entous and Danny Yadron in the Wall Street Journal titled, “U.S. Spy Net on Israel Snares Congress” described how the Obama White House read the results of “incidental” collection of conversations between Israelis and members of Congress opposed to Obama’s Iran deal. Administration sources told Entous, Yadron, and the Journal that the intercepts “reaffirmed” what they’d guessed at, namely that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “focused on building opposition among Democratic lawmakers.” This bizarre admission of using FISA to glean intelligence about a hotly contested legislative vote passed almost without comment.

In 2016, before Trump or Hillary Clinton sewed up their respective party nominations, a bitter clash between intelligence agencies came to a head. An NSA compliance officer in early 2016 sent up an alert about an excess number of certain kinds of searches, including “To and From” queries (in which a user can enter, say, a phone number and receive results going to and from that number) and “About” searches (same, but the search will pull all results that involve a name, number, address, etc). The alert reached then-NSA chief Admiral Michael Rogers, who ordered an internal audit. The NSA in the summer of 2016 found a whopping 85% of all searches of this type were “non-compliant.” From a later FISA court report:

Rogers took the unusual step of cutting off FISA access to FBI private contractors, then went to the FISA court in September of 2016 to make an ex-parte communication to a judge, warning of possible abuses. In October, just before the Trump-Clinton election, the government “orally apprised the Court of significant noncompliance with the NSA’s minimization procedures involving queries of data acquired under Section 702 using U.S. person identifiers.” A month later, on November 17th, 2016, Rogers met with now President-elect Trump at the Trump Tower, reportedly to discuss the Director of National Intelligence job. A Washington Post story quickly appeared claiming “intelligence chiefs” recommended the previous month that Rogers be sacked, naming Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and “Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper” as authors of the recommendation. This story was followed by a similar New York Times piece. One of the few public figures who defended Rogers was Nunes. “It’s not by accident that Admiral Rogers meets with the president-elect and two days later this story… appears,” he told the Times.

All of this is important background for recent Russiagate revelations, including most notably last week’s release by Tulsi Gabbard’s office of an email exchange in which Clapper responded to complaints from Rogers about his NSA being denied access to Russia intelligence. Clapper gave Rogers a frosty reply, not only telling him that the plan was “that’s OUR STORY and we’re stickin’ to it,” but that he may not get the access he wanted, because “we may have to compromise on our ‘normal’ modalities” and “this is a team sport.” It’s impossible to think efforts by Rogers to surface abuses of FISA, and Clapper’s public recommendation that Rogers be fired, didn’t play roles in this moment.

As late as the beginning of March 2017, House Democrats like John Conyers of Michigan and Ted Lieu of California were expressing skepticism and demanding answers about Section 702 of the FISA program, which was about to sunset absent Congressional re-authorization. “The manner in which one collects, maintains and disseminates this information,” said Conyers, “is only lawful if Congress says it is.”

Then a series of episodes hit the news that both transformed the Trump-Russia scandal into an international sensation, and changed the public’s view of intelligence services in general and FISA specifically. The cascade started on March 20, 2017, when FBI Director James Comey sat before a microphone in Congress and told the world his agency was investigating “links” between Trump and Russia:

I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, and that includes… any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts…

News that an FBI Director was investigating his boss sent an already over-amped press corps into a round-the-clock frenzy that would scarcely subside across the next years. “Nixon’s Lawyer John Dean: Trump White House in ‘Cover-Up Mode,” cried USA Today. “Echoes of Watergate Could Spell Danger for Donald Trump,” howled Roll Call. “The Four Bombshells of James Comey,” explained CNN. A giddy Rachel Maddow opened her show by dropping a pencil, before declaring, “This is international warfare against our country and it did not end on election day...”

Cries about Watergate began with a Trump tweet. “Terrible!” the new President wrote on March 4th. “Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” Trump’s claim was roundly denounced as conspiratorial and false, with numerous outlets declaring it “baseless.” However, while “wiretap” might have been a less-than-ideal word choice, the claim eventually proved far from “baseless.” Trump and his aides had been the subject of FISA collection, thanks in part to court-approved monitoring of figures like Carter Page and Paul Manafort, and in part to “incidental” collection of conversations involving Trump figures in FISA intercepts. It would not be long before specific evidence of Trump Tower collection would emerge.

Nunes by then had by then been tipped off to a pattern of “incidental” unmaskings by the Obama administration, but failed to get answers about the issue from the intelligence services, just as Joe Biden and Chris Dodd had failed to get answers about John Bolton years before. He then went to the grounds of the White House, where National Security Council Senior Director of Intelligence Ezra Cohen-Watnick had reportedly begun looking at unmasking requests by the previous administration. After going to a “secure location where he could view the information,” Nunes gave a brief address to reporters, leveling a major claim. “On numerous occasions,” he said, “the intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition”:

Details about U.S. persons associated with the incoming administration, details with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting… I have confirmed that additional names of Trump transition team members were unmasked… Finally, I want to be clear: none of this surveillance was related to Russia, or the investigation of Russian activities, or of the Trump team. From what I know of right now, it looks like incidental collection.

Nearly everything you see, read or hear is an effing lie.

This is how the Uniparty deals with those troublesome American free thinkers.

We find out YEARS LATER that Nunes was smeared with lies.

Susan Rice should be in prison for her unmasking activities not to mention her testimony regarding her use (make that abuse). IIRC, she claimed “she didn’t do it” when confronted. OK, fine. Who did and with whom did you share your access credentials? That in itself is a crime.

Too long of an article without enough meat (all small potatoes).

“Where’s the BEEF?”

Maybe start with a summary. It’s all anyone has time for these days. (e.g. acronyms for EVERTHING) (lol was the beginning).

The days of long articles are OVER. We want SOUND BITES.

By the time a long article is written it is already OLD NEWS.

Not shocked, but greatly disheartened that there should be so many “in on” what appears to be a serious recasting of events and denial of some very cogent data sets that would have revealed a conscious and even criminal intent on the part of those who would seriously reorder the “Great American Experiment”, or dispense with the American Ideal altogether.

Americans in Name Only. Simply being born on the soil, or having gone through the rituals of naturalization, without absorbing the lessons of the growth and maturation our nation has struggled through, and succeeded in reconciling in law and custom, does not guarantee allegiance to the US flag and the Republic for which it stands.

No mention of the 100s of unmasking requests by the UN ambassador Samantha Powers. When confronted she said it wasn’t me. I didn’t do it. She later ran USAID for Biden. Samantha Powers is the wife of Obama’s psychological warfare guru Cass Sunstein. I hope those two are Trump’s traitor list.

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