A declassified list of U.S. officials who received information in response to “unmasking” requests has given allies of President Trump fresh ammunition to question the actions of Obama-era ambassadors.
Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said the National Security Agency memo, which focused on spy intercepts of conversations then-incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn had with foreigners from the 2016 election to Trump’s inauguration, is “just the tip of the iceberg.”
“A lot of them went wild after Trump won. They got poisoned with this Russia hoax,” Nunes told Fox News on Wednesday, referring to the previous administration. “That’s why you had Obama ambassadors across the globe unmasking — all of them were just unmasking and then leaking out about anyone within the Trump campaign and the Trump transition that they could.”
This is a controversy that emerged in the public eye back in the spring of 2017, when Nunes was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The congressman announced that he reviewed “dozens of reports” from the U.S. Intelligence Community about the incidental intelligence collection of communications involving Trump team members and informed the president about what he learned. The California Republican raised concerns about this information being too widely disseminated across the government, even as he stated that he believed the surveillance was legal and stressed it had nothing to do with Russian election interference.
Still, Democrats quickly decried Nunes’s actions as a political cover for Trump, who weeks earlier had accused Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower. The House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, Adam Schiff, said Nunes’s actions cast “great doubt” on his ability to conduct an independent investigation into Russian election meddling and potential ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
Nunes agreed to step aside from the panel’s investigation after facing allegations of mishandling classified information. The matter was scrutinized by the House Ethics Committee, which cleared the congressman of wrongdoing in December 2017.
To this day, Nunes faults the majority of the media for seizing on Russia-related leaks of classified information, including about Flynn, after they went “crazy” because Hillary Clinton lost the election.
The memo released this week showed 16 authorized individuals, who were not specified, made requests on behalf of dozens of officials from Nov. 8, 2016, to the end of January 2017 to reveal what turned out to be Flynn’s identity in intelligence reports about conversations foreigners had with him or other discussions in which he was mentioned. The names of those foreign persons or details of those conversations were not disclosed.
Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, has long been a focus of the “unmasking” saga. Nunes sent a letter to then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats in 2017, telling him the committee found that “one official [Samantha Power], whose position had no apparent intelligence-related function, made hundreds of unmasking requests during the final year of the Obama administration.” Sources told Fox News the number exceeded 260 in 2016.
After Trump’s election, the newly declassified NSA document shows, Power was the authorized recipient of unmasked Flynn intelligence in 2016 on Nov. 30, Dec. 2, Dec. 7, twice on Dec. 14, once on Dec. 23, and once on Jan. 11, 2017.
Yet, during her closed-door testimony to the House Intelligence Committee in October 2017, Power testified that she had “no recollection” of making a request related to Flynn as she was a voracious reader of many intelligence reports. “I have never leaked classified information. I have never leaked names that have come back to me in this highly compartmented process. I have, in fact, never leaked, even unclassified information,” she added.
Then-Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina pressed Power on the unmasking requests, noting the very high volume made in her name — the exact number is redacted in the declassified transcript — and stating “historically speaking, you are the largest unmasker of U.S. persons in our country’s history.”
Power said she did not know the exact amount of requests she made but stressed that “the number is nowhere near the number that I’m reading in the press.”
As the transcript shows, and in an interview that followed, Gowdy insisted Power testified not all the requests made in her name were directed by her. Power suggested the requests were coming out of her U.N. mission in New York City, but they were not necessarily made by her. Power said she did not know for sure, but she noted she was certain the counts by the Intelligence Community were accurately representative of “something.”
Power also disputed the idea that her unmasking had increased during an election year. “My intelligence practice didn’t change in 2016. I don’t recall there being any increase or change in the way that l would’ve asked questions about intelligence,” she said.
On the NSA’s Flynn unmasking list were a wide range of officials, including former Vice President Joe Biden, as well as U.S. ambassadors, one of whom in particular raised suspicions in Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who on his show this week spoke about there being “political hacks” on the list.
“On Dec. 6, for example, the American ambassador to Italy, a guy called John Phillips, asked to unmask Mike Flynn’s name. Phillips is not an intelligence officer. He is an Obama campaign donor who is married to a former Obama aide. Why was Phillips party to spying on an American citizen?” Carlson said on Wednesday. “That means there were an awful lot of intelligence reports being generated with Mike Flynn’s name in them in the closing weeks of the Obama administration.”
Phillips, the founder and partner at Phillips & Cohen law firm, was a high-dollar fundraiser for former President Barack Obama whose wife, Linda Douglass, served as director of communications for the White House Office of Health Reform from 2009 to 2010. Phillips was U.S. ambassador to Italy and San Marino from the fall of 2013 to the end of Obama’s second term.
It’s not clear why Phillips received “unmasking” material related to Flynn. He declined to comment to the Wall Street Journal. It is not uncommon for ambassadors to receive intelligence reports related to the country in which they are posted, which could prompt them to make unmasking requests to better understand the findings. In fact, thousands of unmasking requests are made by officials every year.
Kelly Degnan, the deputy chief of mission of the U.S. Mission to Italy at the time, was also a recipient of the Flynn unmasking material on Dec. 6. She was nominated by Trump to serve as ambassador to Georgia in 2019.
Another diplomat on the list, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey John Bass, made more sense being there, as Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano pointed out, because Flynn’s consulting group had been paid by a group with ties to Turkey’s government.
John Tefft, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, also made an appearance on the list for Dec. 16, a day when several NATO officials received information in response to unmasking requests that revealed Flynn’s name.
Republicans close to Trump have long been suspicious of ambassadors with ties to Obama. In March 2019, Rep. Mark Meadows, who is now Trump’s chief of staff, said information would emerge showing ambassadors, including sitting diplomats, were involved in a “coordinated effort to take this president down” with the Justice Department and the FBI.
Months later, the impeachment saga began, which focused on Trump urging Ukraine to announce investigations into his political rivals, including Biden, who had emerged as a top 2020 contender for the White House. A major component of that political firestorm was Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine before Trump had her recalled from the post in May 2019. Yovanovitch, a longtime diplomat who was nominated to her Ukraine post by Obama in 2016, had become the target of Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others who accused her of being a political enemy of the White House.
Yovanovitch testified that she had become the victim of a “smear campaign,” but Nunes said there was more to the story.
“There’s a reason why she got fired,” the California Republican told Fox News in February. “This is one of the things we could never really get out because we couldn’t bring in witnesses, but you know, we had people that we were ready to bring in that said that she was anti-Trump, espousing anti-Trump administration views while she was ambassador to Ukraine. That’s her boss.”
“She’s lucky we couldn’t bring any actual witnesses in, because there are people that wanted to testify against her,” he added.
Yovanovitch made headlines this week as emails obtained by conservative group Citizens United indicated that she was involved in a discussion about Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas firm that once employed Biden’s son Hunter, even though Yovanovitch testified during the impeachment proceedings that she knew little about and put little focus on the company.
Even now, Republicans in the House and Senate are pursuing documents and witnesses for their investigations into Burisma, which was a central focus for the GOP in the impeachment fight that ended in Trump’s acquittal.
