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DEVIN NUNES VINDICATED — AGAIN. Think back to March 2017. Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, announced he had learned about the “unmasking” of Trump transition officials by the outgoing Obama administration. Most people didn’t even know what unmasking was; it referred to the disclosure of names of Americans whose communications were incidentally picked up in U.S. intelligence surveillance. In this case, one American unmasked was Gen. Michael Flynn, the incoming Trump national security adviser, whose conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak were intercepted by U.S. spies. The unmasking led to enormous grief for Gen. Flynn and the country.
Nunes’ announcement was quickly dismissed as a “stunt,” a “charade,” and a “fiasco.” “The unmasking stunt was completely fabricated,” said former Obama Justice Department official Matthew Miller. “Devin Nunes is dangerous,” pronounced the New York Times’ Frank Bruni. “Nunes’ Fake Scandal” declared the New Yorker. Similar sentiments echoed across the hallowed halls of the Washington Post, the Times, CNN, and MSNBC.
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Then everyone moved on. There was much more to discover. In 2018, Nunes announced the source of the notorious Steele dossier and the fact that U.S. intelligence used its false allegations to win court approval to wiretap a former Trump campaign official, Carter Page. Nunes was again denounced. His discovery was — wait for it — a stunt and a charade and a fiasco. But of course, Nunes was right.
So now, back to unmasking. Thanks to the efforts of Richard Grenell, the temporary head of U.S. intelligence, the list of Obama officials who submitted requests to unmask Flynn during the transition has finally been declassified. A total of 16 Obama officials sought secret information about Flynn, including Vice President Joe Biden, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, UN Ambassador Samantha Power, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough.
The requesters were authorized to receive information about unmasking. Perhaps all of them had entirely legitimate and unremarkable reasons to need to see it. But the bottom line is, there sure were a lot of Obama people interested in Michael Flynn during the transition. What did they want? “The officials listed should confirm whether they reviewed this information, why they asked for it and what they did with it,” said Republican Senators Ron Johnson and Charles Grassley, who asked for the information.
And then there is Devin Nunes. Just as with the dossier, he was right to point out unmasking. And as always, he’s prepared to be denounced again. But he is feeling a sense of vindication. “I sounded the alarm on this in March 2017,” he said in a statement Wednesday night. “It’s an outrageous abuse of Americans’ civil liberties for an administration to exploit our intelligence capabilities to spy on its political opponents. And that’s exactly what happened.”
