WASHINGTON -- Three Republican senators on Wednesday made public a recently declassified list of U.S. officials, including former Vice President Joe Biden, who purportedly sought to "unmask" Donald Trump's adviser Michael Flynn in late 2016 and early 2017.
The list includes the names of more than three dozen former officials of President Barack Obama's administration. Among them are Biden, former White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, former FBI director James Comey, former CIA director John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper.
The list was recently declassified by Trump's top intelligence adviser, Richard Grenell, and given to the Justice Department. Grenell subsequently provided the list, at their request, to Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Rand Paul, R-Ky., who made it public.
A cover letter indicates that those on the list submitted requests to the National Security Agency between Nov. 8, 2016, and Jan. 31, 2017, to "unmask" Flynn, though a note on the list itself suggests it was unknown whether all the officials actually "saw the unmasked information."
Unmasking is a routine practice used to identify a U.S. person who is anonymously referred to in an intelligence document, meant to help government officials better understand what they are reading. But conservatives have said Flynn's unmasking indicates he was treated unfairly by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials.
Early in the Trump administration, the effort to scrutinize unmasking was pushed in part by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., though the House Intelligence Committee he chaired also asked U.S. spy agencies to reveal the names of U.S. individuals or organizations contained in classified intelligence on Russia's interference in the 2016 election.
Kerri Kupec, a Justice Department spokeswoman, told Fox News on Tuesday that U.S. Attorney John Durham -- who is examining the FBI's investigation of the Trump campaign and possible connections with Russia in 2016 -- was "already looking at this issue of unmasking," and would consider the recently declassified list "if it's pertinent."
"I can tell you that his team is working diligently to get to the bottom of what happened, Kupec told host Martha MacCallum. "Because, Martha, what happened to candidate Trump and then President Trump was one of the greatest political injustices in American history and should never happen again."
Some conservatives have connected unmasking to Flynn's late-December 2016 phone calls with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, who was the target of U.S. surveillance. The calls were later the subject of reports from The Washington Post.
Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about the phone calls, though the Justice Department last week moved to throw out the case after coming to the conclusion that agents did not have adequate basis to interview Flynn when they did so.
Many of the unmasking requests in the documents, though, seem to have come before the Flynn-Kislyak phone calls were made.
National security lawyer Mark Zaid noted that the cover letter before the list "makes it clear that every request was authorized and lawful," and that many of the requests were in mid-December.
"If you want to be transparent and fair, show us the document that led all these senior authorized government officials to request this information, that freaked them out all at the same time," Zaid said.
In a statement, Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, and Grassley, who chairs its Finance Committee, said those on the list "should confirm whether they reviewed this information, why they asked for it and what they did with it, and answer many other questions that have been raised by recent revelations." The pair had asked Grenell and Attorney General William Barr to turn over the list a day earlier.
"We are making this public because the American people have a right to know what happened," the senators said, adding, "The records are one step forward in an important effort to get to the bottom of what the Obama administration did during the Russia investigation and to Lt. General Flynn."
Paul released a portion of the list on Twitter and encouraged Senate colleagues to hold hearings on the matter.
In other news, at the time Flynn was forced from the White House, Vice President Mike Pence said he was disappointed Flynn had misled him about his talks with the Russian ambassador.
Now Pence says he'd be happy to see Flynn back in the administration, calling him a "patriot."
Also, a judge has yet to rule on the Justice Department's request to drop the charges against Flynn, opening the door Tuesday to outside individuals and groups to file briefs.
Information for this article was contributed by Matt Zapotosky, Ellen Nakashima, Shane Harris and Devlin Barrett of The Washington Post; and by Eric Tucker, Jonathan Lemire and Mary Clare Jalonick of The Associated Press.
A Section on 05/14/2020