A congressional inquiry into the Trump-Russia investigators is examining the Obama-era unmasking of Trump officials and whether Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act information was improperly shared.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham provided an update to Sharyl Attkisson on Full Measure, sharing his panel’s progress in interviewing a couple dozen key current and former Justice Department and FBI officials.
“[Former Deputy Attorney General] Sally Yates and [former Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper and [former FBI Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe and [former FBI Director James] Comey will all be witnesses along with [former Deputy Attorney General Rod] Rosenstein. [Former U.N. Ambassador] Samantha Power is in the State Department lane. But we’ll know pretty closely, pretty quickly, if an unmasking was abused here for political purposes,” the South Carolina Republican said on Sunday.
Republicans have alleged since 2017 that Obama-era officials improperly unmasked associates of then-candidate Donald Trump’s presidential campaign during the Russia investigation. Unmasking occurs when U.S. intelligence agencies eavesdropping on foreigners sweep up communications with U.S. citizens in what is known as incidental collection. When the intelligence reporting is shared across the government, names of Americans are typically concealed or masked to protect their identities, but the names can be unmasked if U.S. officials make the request.
Then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes said in 2017 he found evidence “that current and former government officials had easy access to U.S. person information and that it is possible that they used this information to achieve partisan political purposes, including the selective, anonymous leaking of such information.” The California Republican said that “the committee has learned that one official, whose position had no apparent intelligence-related function, made hundreds of unmasking requests during the final year of the Obama administration.”
“Obama-era officials sought the identities of Trump transition officials within intelligence reports,” Nunes said.
Rep. Adam Schiff, who has since become chairman of the intelligence panel, countered that “some incidental collection is unavoidable, and, as long as proper procedures are being followed, it is fully lawful” and that “it does not constitute either wiretapping or surveillance of Americans.”
The California Democrat added that “when it is necessary to unmask a name to understand the significance of the communication, there is a process for doing so, which is also lawful.”
The most prominent figure swept up in the unmasking controversy was retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, whose name was repeatedly leaked to multiple media outlets in 2017, along with classified details of government-monitored calls he had with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Flynn pleaded guilty to misleading FBI agents about those calls but has since sought to withdraw his guilty plea.
Both Yates and Clapper were pressed by GOP senators in 2017 about their role in alleged unmasking abuses. Comey told the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 that the NSA, CIA, FBI, and Justice Department all had the ability to unmask individuals.
Republicans also accused former national security adviser Susan Rice of inappropriately unmasking Trump campaign members, but she denied any wrongdoing. “Absolutely not, for any political purposes, to spy, to expose, anything,” Rice said in 2017, adding, “I leaked nothing to nobody.”
Rice also said that “there were occasions when I would receive a report in which a US person was referred to — name not provided, just U.S. person — and sometimes, in that context, in order to understand the importance of that report and assess its significance, it was necessary to find out or request information as to who that U.S. official was.”
There were reports that Power unmasked hundreds while a United Nations ambassador, but former House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy has said she testified behind closed doors that most of the requests didn’t come from her. “So, that’s her testimony, and she was pretty emphatic in it,” Gowdy said. “The intelligence community has assigned this number of requests to her. Her perspective, her testimony, is they may be under my name, but I did not make those requests.”
Power called claims she improperly unmasked anyone “absolutely false.”
Graham also said Sunday he would be investigating whether FISA information gathered during the surveillance of Trump campaign associate Carter Page was improperly collected or shared. Specifically, Graham said he would look into FISA’s “two-hop” rule, which often allows surveillance not just of the specific intelligence target, such as Page, but also of anyone to whom Page was talking as well as people talking to anyone to whom Page was communicating.
“That’s what we’ll be doing. Who did you collect on? Did you mitigate as you’re supposed to?” Graham said. “If it’s a contact not relevant to the investigation, that’s supposed to be flushed from the system.”
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a report in December that criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the FISA surveillance of Page and for its heavy reliance on British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s Democrat-funded salacious and unverified dossier.
The Justice Department said at least the final two of four Page FISA orders were “not valid” and that the FBI sought to “sequester” the information obtained from that surveillance. FBI Director Christopher Wray agreed there had been at least some illegal surveillance and said he was working to “claw back” FISA information gleaned from the Page surveillance.
The FISA court criticized the FBI’s handling of the Page applications as “antithetical to the heightened duty of candor” and demanded an evaluation from the bureau. The FISA court also ordered a review of all FISA filings handled by Kevin Clinesmith, the FBI lawyer who altered a key document about Page in the third renewal process, and ruled that any officials involved in the Page case could not be involved in any more FISA filings for now.
Graham said he would interview certain unnamed DOJ and FBI officials in Horowitz’s report first, including those who interviewed Steele’s primary subsource, followed by public hearings including those who signed off on the Page FISAs: Comey, Yates, Rosenstein, and McCabe. He also plans to call Wray.
“What I’m trying to do is get to the bottom of what happened so we don’t do it again,” Graham said on Sunday.
