Trey Gowdy grilled former Obama CIA Director John Brennan when he testified before the House Intelligence Committee on the Russia investigation.
While everyone focused on Brennan stating he saw no evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia, there was one exchange that flew under the radar.
And it was one question Gowdy asked that has Obama in big trouble.
During the course of interrogating Brennan on the issue of collusion between Trump and the Russian government – Brennan said he hadn’t seen any – Gowdy quizzed the former CIA Director on whether any Ambassadors had requested the unmasking of U.S. citizens caught up in surveillance.
Brennan danced around the issue and meekly stated he could not recall, although it rang a bell.
The media and other observers thought the exchange was odd, but let it pass.
Now we know why Gowdy asked that question.
The House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed Brennan, former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power to testify about the unmasking of U.S. citizens and illegal leaks of classified information to the media.
This is the real crime.
The Russia scandal is nothing but fake news invented by the Democrats and pushed by the media to cripple Trump’s administration through scandal.
But the leaks of classified information – the names of U.S. citizens caught up in the Obama administration’s surveillance – are a felony.
Congressional Republicans are zeroing in on actual criminal conduct, and it’s bad news for Obama and his former underlings.
National Review’s Andrew McCarthy writes:
“Were there to be information indicating that Ms. Power was involved in unmasking American identities in intelligence reports, significant questions would be raised. As ambassador to the U.N., Power, a long-time Obama adviser, held a diplomatic position. She was not an intelligence analyst. It is not immediately clear why the U.N. ambassador would be involved in the disclosure of American identities in intelligence reports — after the agencies that collected and analyzed the intelligence had decided such identities should be masked.
The Journal report further indicates that committee subpoenas demand any information related to unmasking requests by Susan Rice and John Brennan. Ms. Rice was President Obama’s national-security adviser (a White House staff position), and, as we’ve noted, previous reporting has tied her to unmasking activities. Brennan was Obama’s director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA is in the business of gathering and analyzing foreign intelligence outside the United States. In that capacity, the CIA routinely makes judgments about whether identities of Americans should be unmasked.”
The investigation is seeking to answer some serious questions.
Why were Trump officials unmasked?
Who ordered the unmasking?
Why would Samantha Power – who was not an intelligence official – request unmasking?
Were the names unmasked for legitimate purposes, or were they unmasked for political gossip so they could be leaked to the press in order to facilitate negative stories about the Trump administration?
Who violated the law by leaking classified information?
McCarthy goes on to describe the legal jeopardy the Obama administration would have faced for their abuse of power:
“Thus, as I’ve also outlined, it is unlikely that any single instance of unmasking would be found to be a violation of law — and, indeed, it would not violate any penal statute (it would violate court-ordered “minimization” procedures). Nevertheless, were a pattern of unmasking established, divorced from any proper foreign-intelligence purpose, that would be a profound abuse of power in the nature of a “high crime and misdemeanor” — the Constitution’s predicate for impeachment.”
The Obama administration turning the intelligence community into a weapon to deploy against the Trump campaign is one of the great scandals in American history.
Journalists are trying to cover it up by waving the fake news Russia story around as a distraction.
