What’s more, Yates and McCabe each told Congress that when either a transcript or summary of the call was circulated, Flynn’s name was already identified—itself understandable, given that the FBI operates under different guidelines in such circumstances from those that apply generally to the intelligence community.YATES: “When this information was provided to me, nobody was ever asking for his name to be unmasked. Even if there were criminal misconduct involving the leak to the media over three years ago, ask yourself why the investigation just so happens to be heating up now as we enter the general election. Twenty-four hours at the epicenter of the pandemic: nearly fifty New Yorker writers and photographers fanned out to document life in New York City on April 15th. And Trump and his surrogates have only now launched an effort to introduce Biden’s name into the unmasking narrative – blurring both the possible leaker with Biden and the legitimate practice of unmasking with the illegitimate practice of leaking. It is under-inclusive because a much larger group of officials in addition to the ones on the NSA list knew the details of the phone calls and that Flynn was the American on the call. I’m also not familiar with any requests that we received to unmask anything. Trump has been running this play for a long time already, and it seems to me not so much about electoral politics as it is a reflection of the ongoing temper tantrum that is Trump’s response to the global pandemic—a catastrophe that has upended Trump’s Presidency and may well spell his political doom. More Americans will be encouraged to think of Trump and his political loyalists as validated sources of information. On Thursday morning, amid the gravest economic crisis in a century and a deadly On Monday afternoon, at a press conference on the White House lawn, Trump made that clear, in a memorable exchange with Phil Rucker, of the Washington Perhaps, to Trump and his defenders, “Obamagate” really is such a known commodity that defining it is superfluous, even if it is not at all obvious to those who don’t populate Trump’s alternate reality of conspiracy theories and outright lies, a world in which Obama figures as a regular and sinister presence. I’m not – I’m not aware that if we got one, it would strike me as unnecessary if nothing was masked.”The list is also over-inclusive because many of the unmasking requests were made before Flynn and Kislyak’s Dec. 29 phone call occurred, and it’s not known whether requests after that date would be for different intercepted communications.Finally, the unmasking is not well-connected to the leak — taking as our example Biden himself.
The New York Times even stumbled on some incriminating evidence of the Obama administration’s efforts to monitor the Flynn setup. Donald Trump will not shut up about Barack Obama—not now, not ever.
In many ways, the “Obamagate” exchange on Monday reminded me of the first day of the public impeachment hearings last fall in the House Intelligence Committee, in which Democrats spent hours outlining what they knew of the Trump Ukraine-shakedown scheme that had triggered the impeachment proceedings, while The same is true right now with Trump, who, starting with an anti-Obama tweet storm on Mother’s Day that does not seem to have ended yet, has been trying to deflect attention from the pandemic by pursuing a similar strategy to the one that he, Nunes, and other supporters used during the impeachment proceedings. That larger group includes lower-level and senior officials who participated in the FBI’s debriefing Justice Department officials about the Flynn phone call on Feb. 4 and Feb. 6. We also don’t know whether the request from Biden’s office was even for the Dec. 29 call between Kislyak and Flynn. Following the public release of the NSA list, At bottom, the key point here is not allowing anyone, especially including the President of the United States and his attorney general, to convince the American public that there is any scandal beyond what may have happened with the leak. They will be accused of dishonesty and bias, not just of an analytic oversight. Trump’s attacks on Barack Obama, above all else, are a barometer for measuring the level of Trump’s raging insecurity, and what they tell us now is that Trump is having an enormous meltdown, almost certainly connected with his diminishing prospects for reëlection.This seems to be Obama’s interpretation, too. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that the gap between partisan truths in Washington is so wide it’s practically a vortex. Along those lines, Rep. Trey Gowdy engaged in the following exchange with Comey during the March 2017 hearing:GOWDY: So how would you begin your investigation, assuming for the sake of argument that a U.S. citizen’s name appeared in the Washington Post and the New York Times unlawfully. Finally, at 2:44 The reality—in both public-health and crass political terms—doesn’t look good for the President.The U.S. leader, famously illiterate about history, eagerly promotes his place in it.Social distancing and mass burials are now a part of New York’s cityscape. Indeed, “Trump and his allies are now telling a very different story” about Flynn’s exit more than three years ago, the New York Times reported on Thursday. Indeed, the failure to have appreciated the seriousness of the allegations will bolster Trump and his surrogates’ disinformation campaign. Barr’s handpicked federal prosecutor John Durham The groundwork for phase two has been long in the making. director Michael Morell explained to the New York Times, an officer briefing a senior official may make the unmasking request, but that would be logged as a request from the senior official.