For those who have been following the investigation into how the Russiagate hoax got started, you’ve become familiar with disappointment. Well here is another brought to you by former Attorney General Barr and his investigators. In this case it is the failure to prosecute Obama administration officials for leaking classified information containing unmasked American citizens names.
As a reminder any American citizen caught up in classified reports has their name masked to protect their identity. Officials in the Executive Branch can sometimes request these names be unmasked to get a clearer idea of the context of classified materials. These identities are supposed to remain contained to those officials. This was not done in Michael Flynn’s case however, which led Attorney General Barr to appoint John Bash to investigate unmasking during the Obama administration.
As BuzzFeed tells it there just happened to be a “revelation” that Flynn had “lied” about phone conversations he held with Russia’s ambassador to the US. Obviously this revelation didn’t come from heaven but from somebody with access to classified documents with his identity unmasked. To a normal person the reason to leak this information was to make it appear the Trump team was colluding with Russia. This derailed Flynn’s new role as National Security Advisor. That has the stench of a distinctly political hit job .
But through a Freedom of Information Act request, BuzzFeed has obtained the Justice Department probe that found that Obama administration officials did not seek to reveal the identity of Michael Flynn “for political purposes or other inappropriate reasons.”
So how did Bash come to the conclusion that no wrongdoing occurred? Well it appears that because a report that did contain Flynn’s information did not describe the calls between him and the Russian ambassador than “the public disclosure of the communications could not have resulted from an unmasking request.” Talk about splitting hairs. This disconnects the action of the unmasking request(which didn’t lead to a leak) to the actions taken after the unmasking (Flynn’s name being leaked) when in reality they were connected and one led to the other.
Indeed Bash did recognize this fact by noting that “the FBI shared transcripts of the relevant communication outside the Bureau without masking General Flynn’s name.” However he did not investigate those incidents because it was “beyond the scope of this review.”
One would ask why Bash didn’t ask the Attorney General for the authority to continue his probe to determine how this information was provided to the media. More importantly if he did request it why didn’t the Attorney General provide it? When you take this claim by Bash with his comments that “there exists a significant potential for misuse of such information (unmasked identities in classified intelligence) — misuse that could be difficult to detect” it appears that he was onto something but just couldn’t prove it.
This is a far different reading of Bash’s report than BuzzFeed’s that affirmatively claims Obama administration officials were exonerated. But what can you expect of the outlet that first published the Steele Dossier at the behest of Clinton operatives?
