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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsJosh Marshall: "Let's remember what the 'unmasking' scandal is about..."
Link to tweet
Josh Marshall ✔@joshtpm
Let's remember what the 'unmasking' scandal is about. The Obama admin imposed retaliatory sanctions against Russia for interfering in the US presidential elections. They had phone surveillance of the Russian Ambassador talking with an unnamed US citizen about how to deal ...
2/ with the US sanctions. When US citizens are picked up in surveillance of lawful foreign intelligence surveillance their names are "masked". Top NSC officials wanted to know who that US citizen was. It was Mike Flynn.
11:03 AM - May 14, 2020
kentuck
(111,110 posts)...not blamed for unmasking a traitor.
Not to worry. This stupid propaganda campaign
will backfire bigly on the Reeps.
dalton99a
(81,649 posts)czarjak
(11,301 posts)Bernardo de La Paz
(49,052 posts)live love laugh
(13,171 posts)dalton99a
(81,649 posts)celebrating the 10th birthday of the Russian TV network RT
Sergey Ivanov (right), then Putin's chief of staff, sat directly across the table from Flynn at the gala. To his left, is Putin's nominal spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, who U.S. officials say is really the Russian president's de facto national security adviser.
Margarita Simonyan is a personal friend of Putin, and worked in one of his presidential campaigns before being chosen to head RT. She took Putin's seat next to Flynn when Putin went to the stage to speak.
Chainfire
(17,671 posts)Taking orders from his Commander in Chief. Flynn has probably talked to the President about the bad things that could happen if he goes to prison and has too much time on his hands to develop his literary talents. If the AG can't set him free, the President will. The pardon is a powerful tool in the President's legal toolbox.
Flynn will not see prison.
vapor2
(1,250 posts)Wounded Bear
(58,755 posts)Cha
(297,850 posts)crickets
(25,987 posts)Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)nothing more and nothing less.
world wide wally
(21,757 posts)KS Toronado
(17,384 posts)Ford_Prefect
(7,927 posts)maxsolomon
(33,432 posts)Flynn will be the Trump campaign's cause celebre.
Judge Sullivan may not let him off the hook, but the process will get dragged out interminably. It all serves the RW propaganda - confusion is just as good as the truth.
Corgigal
(9,291 posts)Making a stupid phone call. Hes a fool.
Omen78
(81 posts)Is where someone within administration leaked the contents of the discussion and Flynn's name to the Washington Post.
Demsrule86
(68,735 posts)was leaked about Hillary Clinton by the FBI right?
Omen78
(81 posts)If you're looking at where this is probably heading, then the leaking of the unmasked name and contents of the private conversation of a US citizen does become a problem.
Was this "unmasking" illegal?
No. It's common for officials of sufficient seniority. The intelligence agencies get thousands of unmasking requests every year. And the relevant agencies keep records about who makes the requests, as this week's developments have confirmed.
What may have been illegal was when an official in the White House, reviewing these reports and having unmasked Flynn, revealed some of that information to The Washington Post's David Ignatius for a column published Jan. 12, 2017. That sparked the series of events that led to Flynn's defenestration.
Will anyone be charged?
The groundwork has been laid, but it isn't clear if there is any criminal investigation underway.
Investigators, however, could try to use this now-public material to try to link people in the list to Ignatius. Trump has cited what he called the "crimes" from the Obama era and promoted a hashtag, "Obamagate," suggesting that some kind of reckoning might be coming.
[link:https://www.npr.org/2020/05/14/855820024/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-flynn-biden-and-unmasking-story|
I was just relaying what I had read on NPR.
panader0
(25,816 posts)tRump calls unmasking "the greatest crime in political history."
In 2017, tRump had 9,529
in 2018, he had 16,721
in 2019, he had 10,012