*** White House officials asked intelligence agencies to do the unmasking and then blamed them***

[DemocratSinceBirth]

Barton Gellman, Senior Fellow
Barton Gellman is a critically honored author, journalist, and blogger. His professional distinctions include two Pulitzer Prizes (individual and team), the George Polk Award, and Harvard's Goldsmith Prize for investigative reporting.

Is the Trump White House Spying on the FBI?



This brings me to the second question, which I see as the core disclosure of the Times story (even though the Times does not explicitly mention it). If Nunes saw reports that named Trump or his associates, as he said, the initiative for naming names did not come from the originating intelligence agency. That is not how the process works. The names could only have been unmasked if the customers—who seem in this case to have been Trump’s White House appointees—made that request themselves. If anyone breached the president’s privacy, the perpetrators were working down the hall from him. (Okay, probably in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door.) It is of course hypocritical, even deceptive, for Nunes to lay that blame at the feet of intelligence officials, but that is not the central concern either.

If events took place as just described, then what exactly were Trump’s appointees doing? I am not talking only about the political chore of ginning up (ostensible) support for the president’s baseless claims about illegal surveillance by President Obama. I mean this: why would a White House lawyer and the top White House intelligence adviser be requesting copies of these surveillance reports in the first place? Why would they go on to ask that the names be unmasked? There is no chance that the FBI would brief them about the substance or progress of its investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to the Russian government. Were the president’s men using the surveillance assets of the U.S. government to track the FBI investigation from the outside?

https://tcf.org/content/commentary/trump-white-house-spying-fbi/

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Link, please?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

2. This gets curiouser and curiouser.

[Barack_America]

3. I think it stems from that NYT article about the Obama admin's efforts...

...to preserve intelligence. In there, it said that Obama spread some classified stuff far-and-wide, but restricted the most classified stuff (i.e. Trump associate intel) as much as possible.

I think Trump's people read that in the Times and panicked (like one tends to do when they know they've committed a crime). I think they demanded the immediately mass unmasking of all possible intel, then you've got Trump coming out with his BS claims about wiretapping a few days later.

They've been in full-tilt panic mode since that Times article, so...thanks Obama...series.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

4. This is becoming a very, very tangled web.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

7. The White House is spying on the FBI

[coti]

5. Now things are making more sense. Trump is keeping tabs on the FBI's investigation, and they asked

for the names of their interested players to be un-redacted by whoever their source in the agency is.

The two clowns find some information with a marginal relation to Trump's made-up, idiotic tweets, and decide to leak it to one of their ex-bosses so he can hold a press conference and let the public know! They'll be heroes, yay!!

Of course, Nunes is a complete stumblefuck and, not knowing what to do, decides to give the press a near-uselessly vague statement. Still not knowing what to do, he then runs BACK to the White House to ASK- "What the hell am I supposed to do with this info? Why did you give this to me?"

[DemocratSinceBirth]

6. Am I understanding it right ?

The intelligence gatherers call people incidentally caught up in surveillance "name redacted" and the person who commissioned the gathering asks who "name redacted" is.

[wiggs]

8. This is the kind of thing Breitbart / Okeefe did...fake 'stings' designed from

the beginning to make their targets look bad. Even if it requires some creative editing.

This is the WH now...Breitbart, Enquirer, Project Veritas, Twitter.

[randome]

9. Josh Marshall references Gellman in his latest "Gravity Is Strong" article.

This could be why none of the intelligence agencies are willing to entertain immunity for Flynn: they all want revenge on this gang.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]TECT in the name of the Representative approves of this post.[/center][/font][hr]

[coti]

10. Kick- WH Press Corps needs to be asking more accurate questions, this guy is on the right path