thehill | Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Adam Schiff
have both castigated Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee, for his handling of the inquiry into Russia’s
interference in the 2016 presidential election. They should think
twice. The issue that has recently seized Nunes is of vital importance
to anyone who cares about fundamental civil liberties.
The
trail that Nunes is following will inevitably lead back to a
particularly significant leak. On Jan. 12, Washington Post columnist
David Ignatius reported
that “according to a senior U.S. government official, (General Mike)
Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec.
29.”
From Nunes’s statements, it’s clear that he
suspects that this information came from NSA intercepts of Kislyak’s
phone. An Obama official, probably in the White House, “unmasked”
Flynn’s name and passed it on to Ignatius.
Regardless
of how the government collected on Flynn, the leak was a felony and a
violation of his civil rights. But it was also a severe breach of the
public trust. When I worked as an NSC staffer in the White House,
2005-2007, I read dozens of NSA surveillance reports every day. On the
basis of my familiarity with this system, I strongly suspect that
someone in the Obama White House blew a hole in the thin wall that
prevents the government from using information collected from
surveillance to destroy the lives of the citizens whose privacy it is
pledged to protect.
The leaking of Flynn’s name was
part of what can only be described as a White House campaign to hype the
Russian threat and, at the same time, to depict Trump as Vladimir
Putin’s Manchurian candidate.
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