[Bloomberg] Nonetheless, there may be reason to take the gist of Trump's tweet seriously. At least this is the upshot of the latest turn in the story. On Wednesday Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence panel, and that body's ranking Democrat, Adam Schiff announced they were seeking information on how the identities of American citizens picked up in eavesdropping on foreign targets were unmasked in more widely disseminated intelligence reports.
This is important because of the case of Michael Flynn, Trump's first national security adviser. He resigned after the Washington Post reported on his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergei Kislyak, that took place after Trump's victory but before his swearing in. At the time, the story was about how Flynn had not come clean about an element of those conversations, touching on sanctions just imposed on Russia.
But another big part of that story is how the intercepted communications of an incoming national security adviser found its way into the newspaper. Earlier this month, Obama's last director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said there were no Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants that he knew about targeting Trump or his campaign. This surely means that Flynn was caught on a wiretap of the Russian ambassador. Normally, the names of Americans "incidentally collected," to use the intelligence community's phrase, are redacted from reports that are sent out to senior government officials. Was Flynn's name redacted in this case? If not, were summaries or transcripts of his conversation widely distributed within the government? Which would have made it easier to leak.
That's what Nunes and Schiff want to know. In a March 15 letter to the heads of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency, they asked for the total number of times a U.S. person's identity was unmasked between June 2016 and January 2017. They also want to know the names of any U.S. persons unmasked in incidental collection who were affiliated or part of the Trump or Hillary Clinton campaigns in this same period, and who inside the executive branch asked for these names to be unmasked. |