Former U.S. officials question DOJ's probe of 'unmasking' of Trump ally
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[May 29, 2020]
By Mark Hosenball
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - 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.
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"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.
The report did not show how many unmaskings were requested in 2017,
Trump's first year in office.
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![](../images/052920pics/news_m21.jpg)
U.S. Attorney General William Barr delivers remarks at the U.S.
Department of Justice National Opioid Summit in Washington, U.S.,
March 6, 2020. REUTERS/Erin Scott/File Photo
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Recently declassified records made available to senators showed that
Biden, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and
former CIA Director John Brennan, among others, requested limited
unmaskings of reports that turned out to mention Flynn, who advised
Trump's campaign and later served briefly as his national security
adviser. The substance of such messages was not made public.
Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said in an email that
Bash had been tapped to conduct "a thorough review that takes into
account any relevant context" surrounding the unmasking requests.
Senator Mark Warner, the Democratic vice chair of the intelligence
committee, said the probe showed the DOJ was "wielding the power to
criminally investigate political enemies of the president in a way
that is exceedingly dangerous."
Stewart Baker, a former NSA general counsel who also served in
Republican President George W. Bush's administration, said unmasking
requests could be illegal if they had a clear political motivation.
"If the intelligence was properly gathered but read by someone with
two motives, one legit and one not, I don’t expect a prosecution,"
said Baker, who is currently of counsel to law firm Steptoe. "But I
am not prepared to say that the DOJ inquiry is presumptively
improper."
However, Robert Litt, who served in the Obama administration as
chief lawyer to the director of National Intelligence and is now of
counsel to Morrison Foerster, said: "I can't think of what the
possible criminal violation might be, unless they are going to gin
up some sort of conspiracy to defraud the United States."
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(Reporting by Mark Hosenball; additional reporting by Sarah N.
Lynch; editing by Scott Malone and Leslie Adler)
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