The Melania Trump body double hoax and the politicization of President Trump’s phone call to the widow of a fallen soldier has distracted from some important news.
ISIS has now been ejected from its stronghold in the Syrian city of Raqqa. Evidence has been revealed that show President Barack Obama’s administration covered for failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her family on a few occasions, including the connection to a Russian uranium deal.
Perhaps the most interesting bit of under-reported news that may have failed to cross your screen relates to the unmasking of President Trump’s supporters and family members in intelligence reports. Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was implicated in “‘unmasking’ at such a rapid pace in the final months of the Obama administration that she averaged more than one request for every working day in 2016 – and even sought information in the days leading up to President Trump’s inauguration.
Powers recently testified that that others made so-called unmasking requests in her name, according to House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy.
“Her testimony is they may be under my name, but I did not make those requests,” Gowdy said of former Ambassador Samantha Power during an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier on “Special Report with Bret Baier.”Power is among the Obama administration figures who made requests to identify Americans whose names surfaced in foreign intelligence reporting, known as unmasking….”I think if she were on your show, she would say those requests to unmask may have been attributed to her, but they greatly exceed by an exponential factor the requests she actually made,” Gowdy said. “So, that’s her testimony, and she was pretty emphatic in it.”The South Carolina Republican added, “So, we’ve got to get to the bottom of that. If there is someone else making requests on behalf of a principal in the intelligence community, we need to know that because we’re getting ready to reauthorize a program that’s really important to the country, but also has a masking component to it.”
It would be fascinating to learn who is responsible for these unmasking requests. Here’s to hoping someone in Congress or the administration is interested enough to follow the trail to its end. One can deduce, I think, that it is a person who would not have been authorized to unmask these records.
I think American people need to know exactly who was doing what in the Obama Administration. There used to be a time the press was willing to ask, “who knows what” and “when did they know it.” Perhaps if the press reported real news, it wouldn’t be so easy to mock it as #FakeNews.
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