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.”