We know that American citizens working on Trump’s presidential campaign were unmasked during Obama’s presidency. We also know that the discredited Russian dossier was used to obtain FISA warrants to spy on Trump campaign officials. What we don’t know, is why no action has been taken against the officials responsible for the unmasking of US citizens working on the campaign of presidential candidate Donald J. Trump.
On January 11, 2018, President Trump tweeted about the controversial FISA ACT. In his tweet, President Trump claimed that the “FISA ACT may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others?”
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/951431836030459905
In a follow-up tweet, President Trump addressed the “unmasking” process, reminding Americans that the unmasking process was supposed to be used to surveil “foreign bad guys on foreign land”.
With that being said, I have personally directed the fix to the unmasking process since taking office and today’s vote is about foreign surveillance of foreign bad guys on foreign land. We need it! Get smart!
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/951457382651056128
From The Hill: To understand, it helps to begin with the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when U.S. intel agencies sought to expand their surveillance authority — for what seemed like all the right reasons. (For context, a week before 9/11, Robert Mueller had become FBI director; a month earlier, James Clapper had been named head of the agency that supplies image intel to the CIA, and John Brennan recently had become CIA deputy executive director.)
Wiretapping foreigners who could be terrorists isn’t as sensitive an issue since our law doesn’t give them the same protection as U.S. citizens. The problem comes when wiretaps include U.S. citizens in contact with foreign targets. That’s called “incidental” collection.
And it’s not just phone calls. Today’s wiretaps can include everything on the web — emails, bank accounts, photos, messaging, Facebook posts. And “incidental collection” can include anything picked up when a target is watched directly, through a bug, or by secretly activating his computer’s microphone and camera.
U.S. citizens who aren’t accused of crimes are entitled to strong constitutional privacy protections. So, to alleviate worries that citizens’ rights might be violated through “incidental” spying on foreign targets, the intel agencies adopted strict rules. At first, they promised to destroy any “incidental” intelligence they collected. Later, they decided to store it — for a short time — but promised that the names of the U.S. citizens would be “masked,” or hidden, even internally.
Then, they argued that they needed to store the information on U.S. citizens a little longer, and might occasionally need to “unmask” or reveal their names. Still, “unmasking” was supposed to be extraordinarily rare, requiring a high-ranking official’s approval accompanied by a strong legal argument that the citizen’s name is crucial to addressing some national-security threat.
But several years ago, intel insiders tell me, the process was corrupted. Here’s how:
An official who is a bad actor may want to monitor a U.S. citizen — say, a political enemy or a journalist — but knows he could never get wiretap approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). So he develops a pretext to wiretap a foreigner or a target in contact with that citizen. He then “incidentally” captures the citizen’s information, too. Later, he builds a case for “unmasking” the U.S. citizen’s name, supposedly for national security or other crucial reasons.
Here’s the best part — for the bad actors. The U.S. citizens are usually none the wiser. The surveillance isn’t intended to build a criminal case; it’s to collect dirt or political intel or blackmail material. So the corrupt process is never scrutinized in a U.S. court.
Think of it as reverse engineering of intel.
In 2016, very real questions were raised about whether reverse engineering of intel was widely deployed in an unethical manner. A red flag waved when we got a sense of how many Americans are “incidentally” surveilled — so many, that near-daily unmasking requests were said to be made in 2016 under the name of a single official: United Nations Ambassador
Who else was involved? Then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates, national security adviser Susan Rice, and Director of National Intelligence Clapper. Clapper said he requested unmasking of American names “every couple of weeks.”
Apparently, it became so common that Clapper told Congress he probably made some requests on his way out the door before Trump’s inauguration, but couldn’t recall the specifics.
Watch James Clapper and Sally Yates discuss the unmasking of Trump officials or members of Congress with Judiciary Committee Chair, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).
Barack Obama’s former National Security Adviser Susan Rice refused an invitaation from the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify alongside James Clapper and Sally Yates.
One final note: Last October, Amb. Power reportedly told congressional investigators that many of the hundreds of “unmasking” requests in her name in 2016 were not made by her. If true, it implies something equally problematic, or worse: Someone else in the government used her name to unmask Americans.
The good news would seem to be that there’s documentary evidence of all this … if anyone wants to discover it. There are names of who requested what and when, information as to where unmasked intel was sent, names of those who searched the NSA database and under what auspices. Unlike a lot of facets of the Trump-Russia-intel controversy, this trail should be easily traceable.
But we just might be too busy chasing the pretty colors flashing before us every day. They might be keeping us from taking a good hard look at a very serious matter.
Officials involved in unmaskings insist they did nothing improper, that their motivations were to protect the nation. They say they did not act for political reasons, or to spy.
If they did, people could go to prison. Theoretically.
