Ever since Michael Flynn resigned as Donald Trump’s national security adviser three years ago, Trump and his allies have taken an interest in the practice of “unmasking.” Now his administration has revealed the names of the Obama officials who learned Flynn’s name in intelligence reports, but the information isn’t a smoking gun.
Unmasking is a practice that allows senior officials to request the names of U.S. citizens caught up in the surveillance of foreign targets. Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, made dozens of requests during the presidential transition to unmask the identities of U.S. citizens. On Wednesday, the acting director of national intelligence, responding to a request from Sen. Charles Grassley, Ric Grenell, declassified a list of 39 Obama administration officials who made unmasking requests between Nov. 8, 2016, and Jan. 31, 2017, that yielded Flynn’s name in National Security Agency intercepts.
In addition to former Vice President and current presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power and former White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, it includes a number of ambassadors and Treasury Department officials.