White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany wondered what would happen “if the tables were turned” and President Trump’s administration began investigating and unmasking members of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign.
During a Tuesday morning appearance on Fox and Friends, McEnany referred to a memo declassified last week that listed 39 people who received information identifying retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn after 16 of them made unmasking requests related to the former national security adviser. Biden’s name appeared on the list, but it not known whether he made one of the requests or if he even looked at the information.
“You had Sally Yates saying, ‘Wow, I had no idea about this until President Obama informed me about this conversation,'” McEnany said. “You had a half a dozen partisan officials unmasking Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. And you know, Steve, I have to ask you, if the tables were turned, if an RNC-funded dossier was used to spy on members of Vice President Biden’s current campaign, what would happen?”
“What would happen if Trump administration officials like Mark Meadows and Vice President Pence were unmasking people like John Kerry?” she continued. “Heads would explode, and rightfully so, but that’s what happened under the Obama administration, but if the tables were turned, you’d have the media caring a whole lot more.”
Trump has ramped up attacks on Barack Obama and Biden over the last two weeks after a series of documents were released by acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell showed FBI agents discussed if the goal of their 2017 interview with Flynn was to get him to lie so he could be prosecuted or fired.
The president has repeatedly tweeted about “Obamagate,” which has led to further questions about the role that Obama may have played in unmasking Flynn after he communicated with former Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak in December 2016. On May 14, Trump tweeted that “Obama knew everything” before demanding that Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham call the former president to testify in front of Congress about the investigation into Flynn.
Responding to news that Attorney General William Barr “does not expect Vice President Biden or Obama to be involved in any sort of criminal investigation going forward,” McEnany said there are still lingering questions about who knew what and when they knew it during the investigation into Flynn.
“The president’s surprised that there are a lot of questions that still need to be answered by President Obama, by Vice President Joe Biden, namely the fact that the Department of Justice learned about the Michael Flynn conversation and the unmasking in the Oval Office from President Obama,” she said. “I mean, that’s remarkable, think about that.”
