During Barack Obama’s final year in office, there was a surge in requests to unmask the names of Americans recorded in foreign surveillance. The names of American citizens picked up on foreign surveillance are redacted to protect their identities, but they can be revealed if requested.
One unmasker who stands out is former UN ambassador Samantha Power, who was submitting unmasking requests at a rate of one per day during the last year of Obama’s presidency. What could she possibly want to inquire about on such a regular basis?
Powers role in unmasking was odd – because it’s not something you’d expect from a UN ambassador, and unmasking requests themselves are quite rare. In the case of Powers, however, there’s even another layer of oddities. Powers testified behind closed doors about these unmaskings to the House Intelligence Committee on October 13, 2017. We know from Trey Gowdy that “Her [Powers’] testimony is they [the unmasking requests] may be under my name, but I [Powers] did not make those requests.”
Gowdy elaborated further on Fox News about the testimony, “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. So, that’s her testimony, and she was pretty emphatic in it,” he added. “The intelligence community has assigned this number of requests to her. Her perspective, her testimony is, they may be under my name, but I did not make those requests.”
So if not her, who? According to the Gateway Pundit:
An attorney for Trump, Jay Sekulow and his senior counsel Carly Gammill appeared in a Washington D.C. federal court Thursday morning to find out when they will be receiving documents related to the Obama unmasking scandal.
Jay Sekulow said the State Department and NSA have over 9,000 documents related to the Obama unmasking case.
Obama’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power and Ben Rhodes are at the center of the unmasking scandal.
Hundreds of Americans were unmasked in the last year of the Obama Administration. Sekulow pointed out that many illegal leaks of Trump’s transition were directly tied to the unmasking scandal.
Is the truth finally about to be revealed about Obama’s spying on the Trump campaign? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below!
