PPSA Asks Intel Chief, U.S. Attorney, If Unmasking Illegally Used to Spy on Political Opponents

​Is illegal activity occurring?

Bob Goodlatte, former House Judiciary Committee chairman and senior advisor to the Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability (PPSA), and PPSA general counsel Gene Schaerr, asked John Bash – the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas tasked by Attorney General William Barr to investigate the use of unmasking before and after the 2016 election – to reach “a conclusion regarding whether illegal activity occurred.”

Why the jump from 198 unmaskings in 2013 to more than 5,000 in an election year?

In the letter to U.S. Attorney Bash, PPSA poses the following observations and questions based on PPSA’s extensive FOIA requests and research:
 
The Obama administration’s use of unmasking in general increased dramatically during the 2016 election. In 2013, the administration requested unmasking just 198 times. By contrast, there were 4,672 and 5,288 requests for unmasking in 2015 and 2016, respectively.
 
… [I]t is well known that the Obama administration’s electronic surveillance of foreign nationals captured communications by members of the Trump transition team with monitored foreign nationals, as well as communications between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition. Those captured communications contained “valuable political information on the Trump transition such as [with] whom the Trump [transition] team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.”[i]
 
Is the highly partisan stance of some in the FBI a sign of an agency “predisposed to assume the worst?” Is it a sign of political intent?
​
FBI employee Peter Strzok mistakenly predicted that the FBI’s investigation into members of the Trump campaign—perhaps among other investigations—would “stop” Trump’s election. Strzok indicated in numerous text messages his hope that Trump would not be elected. As you know, Strzok was ultimately fired for his conduct.
 
The Obama Administration was unrestrained in its use of unmasking of Trump-associated advisors.
 
For example, recently declassified documents reveal that at least sixteen different officials within the Obama administration—ranging from Vice President Joe Biden to John Bass, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey—submitted requests to the NSA that the identity of Lieutenant General Michael Flynn (ret.) be unmasked.
 
Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice seemed to focus on the Trump transition team.
 
[A] February 2017 National Security Council review of the Obama administration’s unmasking orders revealed that Susan Rice repeatedly requested that the identities of certain Trump transition team members be “unmasked.” Rice’s unmasking requests were not isolated incidents, but a pattern comprising of “dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign[.]”[ii] Indeed, one report indicates that even prior to the election she “ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce ‘detailed spreadsheets’ of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides.”[iii]
 
Did former UN Ambassador Samantha Power lie to Congress under oath, or did someone illegally forge unmasking requests under her name?
 
More troubling is the unmasking by Samantha Power, President Obama’s U.N. Ambassador. She was the government official identified in a letter from the chair of the House Select Committee on Intelligence who, according to the letter, “had no apparent intelligence-related function,” but nevertheless “made hundreds of unmasking requests during the final year of the Obama Administration.”[iv] Some of these requests—nearly 270 in all—came just days (or even hours) before her service in the government ended.[v]
 
… If Gowdy’s understanding is correct, then either (a) Power was lying under oath or (b) someone who was not authorized to unmask intelligence reports illegally submitted requests in her name. You and your investigators need to determine―for both personal privacy and national security reasons―how and why Power was unaware of who submitted these requests in her name and whether intelligence officials routinely use the names of their superiors as autopens for unmasking.
 
Again, why this scale of unmasking?
 
Some of the unmasking orders were not supported by any legitimate national security justification contemplated by Section 702 or applicable minimization procedures. The information connected with the unmasked identities had “little or no apparent foreign intelligence value.”[vi] In particular, some of the unmasking did not concern intelligence “related to Russia or any investigation of Russian activities or of the Trump team.”[vii]
 
PPSA asked Director Ratcliffe: Why the additional jump in unmaskings under the Trump administration, hitting a high of 16,721 in 2018, falling to 10,012 in 2019 – almost double the numbers of the Obama Administration?
                       
Is this dramatic increase the result of increasing surveillance of foreign persons? Or are some in the government increasing unmasking of U.S. persons to get around the Fourth Amendment?
 
PPSA’s Appeal to Bash
 
Investigators should determine whether at least some instances involved what could be fairly described as political fishing expeditions.
 
We request that, as part of your report, the circumstances surrounding all of these unmaskings be addressed in detail, explicitly reaching a conclusion regarding whether illegal activity occurred.

​What is unmasking?

​When Americans are inadvertently caught up in surveillance of foreigners under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the law dictates “minimization” procedures to respect citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights against warrantless searches. The National Security Agency “masks” the identities of these Americans in transcripts, referring to them by generic identifiers. To “unmask” someone in these transcripts, officials at the White House, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the State Department must ask NSA to reveal the target’s identity.

READ: PPSA LETTER To The Honorable John Ratcliffe

READ: PPSA LETTER TO The Honorable John Franklin Bash III

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[i] Eli Lake, Top Obama Adviser Sought Names of Trump Associates in Intel, Bloomberg (April 3, 2019), https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-04-03/top-obama-adviser-sought-names-of-trump-associates-in-intel/.

[ii] Eli Lake, Top Obama Adviser Sought Names of Trump Associates in Intel, Bloomberg (April 3, 2019), https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-04-03/top-obama-adviser-sought-names-of-trump-associates-in-intel.

[iii] Richard Pollock, Former U.S. Attorney: Susan Rice ordered spy agencies to produce detailed spreadsheets involving Trump, Daily Caller, April 3, 2017, http://dailycaller.com/2017/04/03/susan-rice-ordered-spy-agencies-to-produce-detailed-spreadsheets-involving-trump/

[iv] See Letter from Chairman Devin Nunes to Dan Coats, Director of National Intelligence, July 27, 2017, at 2.

[v] Bret Baier and Catherine Herridge, Samantha Power sought to unmask Americans on almost daily basis, sources say, Fox News (Sep. 21, 2017), http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/09/20/samantha-power-sought-to-unmask-americans-on-almost-daily-basis-sources-say.html.

[vi] See Exhibit A, Chairman Nunes Comments on Incidental Collection of Trump Associates, Mar. 22, 2017, archived at: https://web.archive.org/web/20170829052809/https://intelligence.house.gov/ news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=774.

[vii] Id.