‘Somebody cooked up this plot. Somebody gave an order. Somebody did the dirty work. … And the American taxpayer has footed the bill…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Acting Director of National Security Richard Grenell‘s release of a long awaited list of Obama administration officials who were allowed to unmask intelligence reports on Michael Flynn, then the national security advisor in waiting, “smell[ed] of politics,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC.
Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., said it was a “coup” in an appearance on Lou Dobb’s Fox News show.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., turned the lens on Flynn’s NSA predecessor, Susan Rice, calling her approval of the unmasking requests “negligent at best and criminal at worst.”
One thing that most conservative leaders and analysts seemed certain of, as former acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker observed, was that the latest, much anticipated disclosures in Flynn’s legal battle were just the “tip of the iceberg.”
On Tuesday night, Blackburn told Fox’s Shannon Bream that it was Congress’s duty to get to the bottom of it.
“Somebody cooked up this plot,” she said. “Somebody gave an order. Somebody did the dirty work. Michael Flynn paid a price. The Trump administration paid a price. And the American taxpayer has footed the bill.”
Graham, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the Justice Department and the FBI, likewise promised to investigate it.
“In light of General Flynn’s unmasking by the Obama Administration, the job of Congress will be to perform oversight of these unmasking requests to ensure the process was used for legitimate national security concerns, not reprisals or political curiosity,” he said.
“I specifically want to know how many unmasking requests were made, if any, beyond General Flynn regarding members of the Trump campaign team, family, or associates,” he continued.
Flynn was one of the five members of the Trump campaign (likely including the president himself) who was investigated as part of special counsel Robert Mueller‘s two-year probe into Russian collusion, which stemmed from an FBI operation.
That was, in turn, predicated on Russian disinformation included in the Steele Dossier, which was largely underwritten by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
The recent revelations that top FBI officials knew about the dossier’s credibility issues and planned out how to ensnare Flynn in a perjury trap have intensified the push to investigate the investigators, whose partisan misconduct already was established in a series of reports by the DOJ inspector general.
The conclusion of special prosecutor John Durham‘s wide-ranging criminal probe into the conspiracy’s origin is expected to arrive sometime this summer, with prosecutions likely.
Already, though, partisans on the Left have been launching their pre-emptive defense, with former Attorney General and Obama “wing man” Eric Holder among those seeking to de-legitimize the investigation.
Despite the sense of outrage felt on the Right over the Obama administration’s gross perversion of justice, Democrats continued to circle the wagons and deny even the slightest malfeasance in the dubious plot to spy on American citizens’ telephone conversations under the guise of national security, reveal their identities and then leak information to the media for the express purpose of doing political damage to the incoming rival administration.
“[U]nmasking is something that you are just looking to just seem more intelligent,” claimed Democratic National Committee spokesperson Xochitl Hinojosa, according to Fox News.
“It is nothing that is scandalous in any way,” Hinojosa continued. “But frankly, this is going to backfire on Republicans because it just shows how serious Flynn was in his conversations with the Russians. So Republicans can try to use this to play political football. But in reality, this will backfire.”