High ranking officials within the Obama administration exploited national security protocol for political reasons, why isn’t this a major scandal?
Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has been keeping a low profile after Democrats forced him out of the panel’s investigation into Russian election meddling.
Back in March, Nunes sent shockwaves through the political system when he revealed that he had received materials confirming President Donald Trump’s claims that he was being spied on by Barack Obama.
He claimed that the Trump campaign and perhaps even the POTUS himself were subjected to having their names illegally “unmasked” in intelligence reports with Susan Rice being one of the offenders. It has since emerged that UN Ambassador Samantha Power aka Mrs. Cass Sunstein also played a key role in the unmasking requests.
Nunes was immediately demonized by the media and accused of being in cahoots with Putin by Democrats. He was then bullied into recusing himself from Adam Schiff’s great witch hunt and has been largely invisible ever since.
But that changed last week when Nunes sent a letter to Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats claiming that hundreds of “unmasking” requests had been made by Obama officials without the justification of why they needed the information.
#BREAKING: Intelligence chairman accuses Obama aides of hundreds of unmasking requests https://t.co/iEcTKNcMr9 pic.twitter.com/Pxj5oWgoDi
— The Hill (@thehill) July 27, 2017
According to The Hill “Intelligence chairman accuses Obama aides of hundreds of unmasking requests”:
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is accusing top political aides of President Obama of making hundreds of requests during the 2016 presidential race to unmask the names of Americans in intelligence reports, including Trump transition officials.
Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), in a letter to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, said the requests were made without specific justifications on why the information was needed.
“We have found evidence that current and former government officials had easy access to U.S. person information and that it is possible that they used this information to achieve partisan political purposes, including the selective, anonymous leaking of such information,” Nunes wrote in the letter to Coats.
The letter was provided to The Hill from a source in the intelligence community.
Nunes’ letter can be read HERE.
It is imperative that investigations be launched into the extent to which former Obama officials abused national security surveillance programs for political means.
This is an exponentially greater scandal that the Trump-Russia hoax and reaches directly into the Oval Office under Obama. This is what should be investigated by a special prosecutor yet there are crickets in the media over this gross abuse of power.
