Report: John Brennan Used Private Contractors to Unmask Trump Officials Because Official Government Employees Are Required to File a Report When They Unmask US Citizens

This is criminal.

Update: Some are asking what "unmasking" means. Sorry, I should have explained.

When the intelligence community is listening, with no warrants, in on foreign citizens' phone calls, sometimes they also listen in on an American the foreigner is calling.

They say that this is legal, because they weren't deliberately trying to spy on an American.

This is largely bullshit, by the way -- they use this end-around as a pretext for spying on any American they don't like -- but that's not related to unmasking.

To keep this allegedly "incidental" spying on Americans as non-intrusive as possible, the IC is required to anonymize the Americans caught up in the spy net, to "mask" them. That is, the IC keeps the transcripts of the calls and can use these "inadvertently" (bullshit!) captured calls for intelligence purposes, but they have to scrub out the name of the American attached to the call, to protect his privacy.

When you "unmask" an American, you demand that the name of the American you spied on be attached to the transcript of the call you intercepted. You reveal that which the law requires to be kept secret.

"Unmasking" an American is a major breach of people's privacy -- attaching a name to a call that shouldn't have been eavesdropped on in the first place, not without a warrant. So you're supposed to have a very strong intelligence or law enforcement pretext for doing so.

Instead, the Obama administration just stared unmasking every call made by Trump personnel "inadvertently" spied on by Obama's minions.

They did this so that the information could be leaked.

In his last days in office, Obama also changed the rules about who was allowed to see "unmasked' names. Previously, the secret must be closely held -- again, to keep some privacy for Americans wrongly spied on.

But Obama changed the rules so that the names could be propagated far and wide in government, with hundreds, possibly thousands, of people having access to unmasked names which are supposed to be a closely-held secret.

He did this so that anyone who wanted to leak the names to the press could not be caught -- if just one or two people know the names, it would be easy to determine the leakers, and prosecute them. But if hundreds or thousands of them know it...?

Where would you even start looking?

Update:

Excuse me, but how the FUCK can a CONTRACTOR have the ability to 'unmask' anything?? That is fucked up.

Posted by: Deplorable Ian Galt at May 12, 2020 03:37 PM (ufFY

Dirty little secret - you do not have to actually be a "Contractor" to get badged. Just somebody with authority to tell (via standardized forms that is) the ID guys to give you a "contractor" badge. Now, if you are an actual bona fide government drone or member of the military - they will verify that.

Brennan or one of his authorized 'badging official' confederates fills of the form. Bamn! Dude has badge even if he does not have a contract.

Remember Comey's leaky pass-through buddy who was his attorney and 'special employee', he was badged and had unfettered access.
Posted by: Burnt Toast

I'm thinking that the hundreds of hundreds of people supposedly unmasked by Samantha Power might have really been unmasked by Brennan's contractors, using her badge.

Back to the original post:

But meanwhile, ABCNews has a "source," supposedly, at the DOJ who says there is no intention to make the declassified names of the unmaskers public:

I hope that either 1, that's wrong, another wish fulfillment lie pushed by anonymous sources who don't know shit but talk to the leftwing media all day, or 2, the names are being kept private because this is a criminal investigation, not a media investigation.

Apparently It's Option 1: ABC's "Sources" Are Fucking Know-Nothings: Via Jack Straw, DOJ official Jake B. Gibson says the information is in the hands of ODNI, and Justice has nothing to do with it.

So it's not even the DOJ's call to make.

@BrookeSingman

"The Justice Department is confused as to where the idea that we would be releasing this information came from, given that ODNI is the owner of that information, if they want to release it they can do it, that's their call," the DOJ official told Fox News.
@JakeBGibson

But whatever, ABC. Keep telling us what your pig-ignorant, fabulist anonymous leakers say.

Report: John Brennan Used Private Contractors to Unmask Trump Officials Because Official Government Employees Are Required to File a Report When They Unmask US Citizens&bodytext=This is criminal. As I’m told the list Grenell brought over is much larger than anything involving Flynn. “The exact tasking flow is hard to discern because the stuff was flying everywhere.”— Adam Housley (@adamhousley) May 12, 2020 Contractors working...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace at 03:33 PM

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