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There continues to be an enormous amount of confusion swirling around the leak of Michael Flynn's telephone conversation with Russian Ambassador Kislyak to David Ignatius of the Washington Post. A lot of people have been twisting themselves into conceptual pretzels. All sorts of theories to explain why Flynn was or, as it happens, was not "unmasked" have been advanced--few of which show any understanding or even awareness of FISA procedures and rules. I'll state the bottom line first: With regard to the Flynn/KIslyak conversation itself, "unmasking" is basically irrelevant because there was no need to unmask Flynn's identity in that conversation--for reasons that will be explained. On the other hand, the massive and quite unprecedented amount of "unmasking" that went on in the Obama administration does point to a very serious problem. What it indicates is that high Obama officials, usually often political appointees, were combing through intelligence reports in an attempt to find derogatory information on political opponents.
To understand "unmasking" it may be helpful to get down to a procedural level. How does that occur, and why? The circumstances in which unmasking is requested by a government official near the top of the food chain would normally be something like this. The official receives an intelligence "product" of some sort in which identifying information regarding a US Person (USPER) is "minimized"--in other words, information in the report is redacted to hide the identity of the USPER because the lower level official who prepared the document judged the USPER's identity to be irrelevant for official government purposes. The higher level official receiving the "product" may disagree--perhaps knowing more about the context of the report--than the lower level preparer. So the official submits a request to unmask the USPER's name. That should be done for an articulable reason, not simply out of curiousity. That's how it's all supposed to work.
The real problem arises when unmasking is not done for articulable official purposes but instead for personal or political reasons--usually as a prelude to leaking the USPER's name to the outside world, which is a crime. A few instances of unmasking by a given official may not appear overly troubling on its face, but when unmasking becomes a pattern of behavior real suspicions can arise that the unmasking official is actively seeking information to leak for political purposes. The suspicion arises because it would be unusual to be second guessing the highly trained preparers of intelligence documents on such a regular basis. That seems to have been the case with Samantha Power. The problem isn't with the unmasking per se so much as with the use that the unmasked information is put to. In the case of Flynn, of course, it was part of an elaborate frame job.
The fact that in administrations prior to the Obama administration unmasking was so rare speaks volumes about the mindset in the Obama administration. However, the difficulty for the investigator of unmasking is to link specific unmaskings to specific leaks by specific individuals. Were you wondering what's taking Durham's investigation so long? If you reflect on the above you'll have some idea. There's a lot of digging involved, and especially with so much activity as we've seen.
As if all this weren't complicated enough, uninformed opinions are regularly advanced to "explain" all this. Dan Bongino and sundance have each came up with what they think is the answer to what should be a non-question: How did the FBI know about Flynn's conversation with Kislyak. It may not surprise you to learn that Bongino and sundance have each came up with different answers. Bongino thinks it came from an illegal use of emergency FISA powers by Obama himself. Sundance thinks it came from a pen register on Flynn's phone.
Me? My answer has always been: it came from a "tech cut". Remember tech cuts? I wrote about them in What does "CR cuts" Mean?
