The Wall Street Journal reports today, based on information from a “Republican official” on the Hill, that at least two Trump transition staffers had their names unmasked by Obama administration officials.
One of them was former national security adviser Mike Flynn, whose conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the United States were leaked to the media. Flynn was ultimately forced to resign after less than a month in office because he had misrepresented the subject of his conversation to Vice President Mike Pence, who subsequently went on television and assured the nation, based on Flynn’s word, that he had not discussed the undoing of sanctions that President Barack Obama had just imposed.
But Rice unmasked someone else’s name in the context of conversations with officials from another foreign government — not Russia.
A Republican official familiar with deliberations by GOP lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee said that the names of two U.S. citizens who were part of Mr. Trump’s transition team have been unmasked in intelligence reports.
One is Mr. Flynn and the other hasn’t been identified, said the official. The report involving Mr. Flynn documented phone conversations he had in late December with the Russian ambassador to the U.S.
The official said Ms. Rice had requested the unmasking of at least one transition official—not Mr. Flynn—who was part of multiple foreign conversations that weren’t related to Russia.
This explains part of what House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes said in his now-infamous presser, that the information he saw was not Russia-related, and that it had no obvious intelligence value.
So when Rice says she didn’t leak Flynn’s name to the Washington Post, she may well be speaking the truth. The question seems to be who else she did peek in on, which government was he or she (or they) speaking to, and why did she request to see who it was.
