President Trump

Former National Security Officials: The “Unmasking” List Could Be Bad News for Mike Flynn

“This is a long list of names of people across disparate areas of government who independently felt” incidents involving Flynn were problematic, said one former official.

By Abigail Tracy

May 15, 2020

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The “unmasking” controversy is in a sense the official kickoff of the Trump campaign, a sequel to “Obama was born in Kenya” and Hillary’s emails. It was unveiled when Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence who’s long been a highly politicized Trump loyalist, declassified a list of Obama administration officials who requested to “unmask” an American citizen anonymously identified in intelligence reports, who turned out to be Michael Flynn. Against the backdrop of Flynn’s changing legal fortunes, Trumpworld has latched onto the document to rewrite the Russia saga and seemingly absolve the former national security adviser of wrongdoing, which he pleaded guilty to, propping him up as a martyr, targeted in a witch hunt by Trump’s political enemies. It’s a made-for-media story that former national security officials say, is essentially a fiction. “I think it is a desperate and manipulative attempt to turn into a scandal what was appropriate action taken by senior officials,” a former national security official told me.

The declassified list, which Republican senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley released earlier this week, reads as a who’s who of the Obama administration, featuring James Clapper, James Comey, Samantha Power, and even former vice president and Trump’s presumptive challenger in the 2020 election, Joe Biden. But despite the seemingly nefarious undertone of the process known within the intelligence community as “unmasking,” former officials familiar vehemently assert that it is commonplace. “You can’t do your job without it,” Michael Morell, the former acting director of the CIA during the Obama administration and host of the Intelligence Matters podcast, said, noting that he made such requests to the National Security Agency several times a month during his tenure to better understand the underlying intelligence in reports.

The document details more than three dozen requests by Obama officials between the November 2016 election and Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. Trump and his allies have argued that the sheer number of unmasking requests that revealed Flynn suggest an effort within the Obama administration to target the retired Army lieutenant and, by extension, the Trump campaign. But intelligence veterans say that to make this argument is to fundamentally misunderstand and mischaracterize the process itself. “That narrative doesn’t really hold together because by definition, when these [intelligence community] officials are looking at these reports, they don’t know who ‘U.S. person number one’ is,” April Doss, a former NSA lawyer under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told me, referencing how Americans are anonymously identified in such reports. “I think it’s important for folks to understand that not only is this not a way to fish for information about Mike Flynn or anybody else, but it also doesn’t trigger further fishing…. There’s just really nothing in what’s been released that would suggest that the requests were being sent in for the purpose of targeting him and it would be a really backwards way to do it.”

All of the requests involving Flynn were approved through an NSA process, which requires officials to provide justification. And notably, the identity of an unmasked individual is subject to the same classification standards as the initial underlying report—marking a sharp contrast to the concept of an intelligence leak. “Nobody unmasked Michael Flynn. Cleared national security officials request the unmasking of a U.S. person whose name they do not know to better understand an intelligence report. You don’t know who the person is, that is the entire point of unmasking and it is an important and common tool used in intelligence,” Nick Shapiro, the former CIA deputy chief of staff, told me, noting that unmasking requests have spiked under Trump relative to Obama. “The problem here is not unmasking, it’s that the unconfirmed, acting DNI used his position to politicize intelligence to help reelect the president. That’s the problem and it’s an unconscionable abuse of power.”

Former FBI counterintelligence agent Asha Rangappa posits that to the contrary of the Trumpian line, the volume of unmasking requests related to Flynn’s behavior, is a bad look for him—not the Obama administration. “This does not help Flynn,” she told me. “This is a long list of names of people across disparate areas of government who independently felt that the intelligence reports they were reading were so alarming that they needed to know—without knowing, by the way, who it was beforehand—[who] the person was that was engaging in that communication or activity.” Driving this point home, Rangappa asked of Grenell, “Why not go ahead and disclose the underlying intelligence report?” In other words, if the Trumpian line of attack is that these Obama officials were acting inappropriately and without cause, make that case. Of course, conspiracy theories don’t thrive in context. And transparency has never been the currency of Trumpworld; details be damned.

Grenell’s declassification follows the stunning Justice Department decision to drop its case against Flynn, who was charged with and pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the former Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak. Among veterans of the D.C. bar, the move by the Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr to dismiss the charges, was met with alarm. “I was flabbergasted in reading DOJ’s motion,” William Jeffress, a prominent Washington defense attorney who worked on the Valerie Plame leak case, told me. “They gave two reasons for the motion, both of which are legally baseless. His answers to the FBI were certainly material to whether he had a conversation with a foreign power and lied about it to the V.P.-elect, thus giving Russia leverage over him. And DOJ’s motion relies on a 1956 court opinion when there are dozens, if not hundreds, of decisions since then emphasizing how little it takes to satisfy the materiality requirement. The second reason given is that DOJ doesn’t believe it can prove the lie beyond a reasonable doubt. But Flynn when entering his plea under oath admitted intentionally lying.”

But Barr and Grenell effectively struck two pieces of flint together to create smoke, if not fire. Devoid of context or explanation, the unmasking list is already being deployed by allies of the president to paint Flynn as a victim of Trump’s political enemies. And the motion to dismiss the charges against Flynn—never mind his guilty plea—buttresses the narrative that the Russia investigation was a hoax; the charges were trumped up from the start. And Trump’s allies continue to say the quiet part out loud. Two campaign officials told the Washington Post that the effort is designed to tarnish the president’s top rival, Biden, and Obama, the former vice president’s top surrogate. And the president’s congressional allies haven’t even attempted to hide their hands from the public. “We sort of have the smoking gun because we now have the declassified document with Joe Biden’s name on it,” Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said.

Doss reiterated to me, “On its face there’s nothing in that list that suggests anything improper was done.” For Trump, however, that is not the point.

Abigail Tracy

National Political Reporter