Joe Biden's unmasking of Michael Flynn. What is 'unmasking'?

In 2016, U.S. intelligence reports showed someone was talking to the Russian ambassador to the U.S. Several top officials, including Joe Biden, legally asked who? It was Michael Flynn, an adviser to President-elect Donald Trump.

|
Jon Elswick/AP
A declassified document with names of Obama administration officials who made requests for unmasking of Michael Flynn's name is photographed May 13, 2020. The document was declassified by acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell.

In 2016, Obama administration officials received intelligence reports that were concerning, but incomplete.

Surveillance of Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. revealed he had interacted with an unnamed American who may have been undercutting efforts to pressure Vladimir Putin’s government.

Using a common process known as “unmasking,” they asked intelligence agencies to reveal the American’s name. It was Michael Flynn, an adviser to President-elect Donald Trump.

The unmasking of Flynn has become Exhibit A in Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that he and his aides were the targets of a scandalous Obama administration “witch hunt.”

The top intelligence official, Richard Grenell, now has stepped into the unmasking issue, declassifying the names of the Obama administration officials who may have requested the unmasking. Those names, disclosed Wednesday by two Republican senators, included Trump’s Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden.

There is nothing illegal about unmasking and the declassified document states that proper procedures were followed. While Trump casts unmasking as sinister, his administration has used the process more frequently than Obama’s.

Questions and answers about “unmasking” Americans’ names in intelligence briefs:

What is unmasking?

During routine, legal surveillance of foreign targets, names of Americans occasionally come up in conversations. Foreigners could be talking about a U.S. citizen or U.S. permanent resident by name, or a foreigner could be speaking directly to an American. When an American's name is swept up in surveillance of foreigners, it is called “incidental collection.” In these cases, the name of the American is masked before the intelligence is distributed to administration officials to avoid invading that person's privacy.

Unless there is a clear intelligence value to knowing the American’s name, it is not revealed in the reports. The intelligence report would refer to the person only as “U.S. Person 1” or U.S. Person 2." If U.S. officials with proper clearance to review the report want to know the identity, they can ask the agency that collected the information – perhaps the FBI, CIA or National Security Agency – to “unmask” the name.

Unmasking requests are common, according to Michael Morell, former CIA deputy director and host of “Intelligence Matters” podcast.

“Literally hundreds of times a year across multiple administrations. In general, senior officials make the requests when necessary to understand the underlying intelligence. I myself did it several times a month and NSA adjudicates the request. You can’t do your job without it," he said.

Mr. Morell emphasized that unmasking is not the same as declassification. “When a name is unmasked, the underlying intelligence to include the name remains classified so leaking it would be a crime.”

When would an intelligence agency unmask a name?

The request is not automatically granted. The person asking has to have a good reason. Typically, the reason is that not knowing the name makes it impossible to fully understand the intelligence provided.

The name is released only if the official requesting it has a need to know and the “identity is necessary to understand foreign intelligence information or assess its importance,” according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's latest report, which includes statistics on unmasking. “Additional approval by a designated NSA official is also required.”

Former NSA Director Mike Rogers has said that only 20 of his employees could approve an unmasking. The names are shared only with the specific official who asked. They are not released publicly. Leaking a name, or any classified information, is illegal.

How often are names unmasked?

The number of unmasking requests began being released to the public in response to recommendations in 2014 from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

There were 9,217 unmasking requests in the 12-month period between September 2015 and August 2016, the first period in which numbers are publicly available. The period was during the latter years of the Obama administration.

The number rose during the Trump administration. The 9,529 requests in 2017 grew to 16,721 in 2018 and 10,012 last year.

Why would Obama officials be looking at the ambassador's conversations?

It’s not unusual for the U.S. government to use intelligence collected from foreigners to get a sense of how other countries view the administration.

Also, at the end of the Obama administration, the FBI and the NSA were looking into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. One aim of the probe was to find out whether any Trump associates had colluded with Russia to help Trump get elected.

Because of that review, intelligence agencies were generating more reports that were shared with senior Obama officials.

Why is this issue being discussed in the news now? 

Mr. Trump and his supporters have made the unmasking of Mr. Flynn one of their major talking points and discussions of it have become a fixture on conservative media. They claim it proves that Obama administration unfairly – and maybe illegally – targeted Flynn and other Trump associates.

But there’s no evidence the unmasking of Mr. Flynn was illegal. The memo released by the Republican senators notes that it was approved through the NSA’s “standard process.”

Democrats see the unmasking issue as aimed at energizing Mr. Trump’s base at a time when the president’s response to COVID-19 has been called into question and he faces the prospect of running for reelection with the worst economy since the Great Depression.

The role of Mr. Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence and a Trump loyalist, in declassifying the names of Obama officials who had unmasked Mr. Flynn, will likely add to criticism that Mr. Trump has bent nonpartisan national security agencies to serve him politically. The decision follows the Justice Department’s move to drop charges against Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contact with the Russian ambassador.

This story was reported by The Associated Press. 

Editor’s note: As a public service, the Monitor has removed the paywall for all our coronavirus coverage. It’s free.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Joe Biden's unmasking of Michael Flynn. What is 'unmasking'?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2020/0514/Joe-Biden-s-unmasking-of-Michael-Flynn.-What-is-unmasking
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe