If politicians were wiretapping your phone, you’d want to know. And if they were breaking the law by doing so, you’d want them to be held accountable. Official records released last week suggest that former Vice President Joe Biden and other high-level Obama administration political appointees may have broken the law.
Before serving in Congress, I spent over 26 years in the Air Force, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. During my military career, and as a defense contractor following my service, I had various jobs that required me to have access to highly classified information. While director of the chief information officer staff at U.S. Special Operations Command, I held one of the highest levels of security clearances in government.
But my high security clearance alone did not permit me to access all classified information, because there was a second prerequisite for access to certain classified information — a clearly identified “need to know.”
So, my position or security clearance didn’t qualify me to see all of our nation’s secrets. I only saw a subset of them based on whether my assigned work required me to see them. It would have been a federal crime for me to gain access to intelligence and classified information for which I didn’t have a clearly specified “need to know.”
Federal law sometimes permits the FBI to listen in on phone conversations of foreigners in America. If that foreigner is speaking to an American private citizen, the name of the private citizen is required to be masked from almost everyone in the counterintelligence world.
If a government official has a legitimate “need to know” for the name of that private citizen, the official can seek to have that individual’s identity “unmasked.” But unmasking is a serious act, and such a request would normally only be granted to a select group of intelligence community or Justice Department officials who are on the front lines of working a case. Yet, like in the military, a private citizen’s masked name is classified information, and those without a clear “need to know” may be in violation of the law if they seek to unmask the individual.
Why should you care about all this? Because we now know that then-Vice President Biden made an unmasking request to obtain the name of Michael Flynn, only eight days before Biden was about to leave government service and lose his access to classified information. He wasn’t on the front line as an investigator, and he was on his way out the door, so he almost assuredly did not have a “need to know” for the classified information he sought.
The history of this topic sheds light into just how serious of a breach this really is. Decades ago, Intelligence Community officials were barred from capturing the information of innocent people whose conversations were incidentally picked up on wiretaps or surveillance of foreign officials or terrorists. Since then, private citizens have been caught in this security net thousands of times a year. Washington bureaucrats promised that this was not a privacy violation because the identities of private citizens would be masked to nearly everyone who saw the confidential wiretap transcripts — except those with a legitimate “need to know.”
Guess what? They lied — at least in the case of Flynn, they did. Dozens of Obama administration officials improperly asked for the information to be unmasked, but the most prominent of those offenders was Biden. These were the political opponents of Donald Trump, who were still spiteful over his 2016 election victory. Because Flynn was on the Trump team, he was targeted.
The questions that every reporter who interviews Biden should ask are simple: What was your “need to know” for the identity of a private American citizen? And, since you were just days away from losing your power to do anything in government and you were not involved in conducting intelligence investigations, why would you even want to know the identity?
Here’s the most troubling issue in all of this: Without a legitimate “need to know” for the classified information he requested, it may well have been illegal for Biden to even ask for, and for the intelligence officials to provide, such access. This may well be true for other political officeholders in the Obama administration who similarly asked for access without the legally required “need to know.”
This issue needs to be addressed, and it’s why I’m calling for the Justice Department inspector general and the appropriate congressional oversight committees to investigate whether Biden and others acted criminally by using their positions to gain access to classified information through unmasking when they likely had no legitimate “need to know” for that information.
During my Air Force career, had someone under my command done what Biden did, I would have called for an investigation and potential charges to be filed. As a member of Congress, with oversight responsibilities over the executive branch, I now have an obligation to do the same thing.
Rep. Bill Johnson, a Republican, represents Ohio’s 6th Congressional District.
