Army Spc. Caleb Ardaiz, a Task Force Guardian sniper, prepares to provide security for an Air Force C-130J Super Hercules in Somalia, June 16, 2020. The task force provides base security and force protection for Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa personnel and U.S. partner forces deployed in the region. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Shawn White)
The fight over definitive answers about whether America's spy agencies spy on members of Congress is heating up because the now-departed Acting DNI Ric Grenell released a lot of details about Democrats' unmasking of Gen. Michael Flynn during the Barack Obama administration – and said that was no national security risk.
"As you well know, the decision to declassify the names of individuals who sought to unmask the identity of General Flynn poses absolutely no risk of compromise of either sources or methods," he told Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., at the time.
Warner's the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The issue is that that was the very claim from the Office of Director of National Intelligence to a request for information about whether spy agencies it supervises unmasked the identities of current and former lawmakers over the course of foreign intelligence, investigative reporter John Solomon explains at Just the News.
The dispute dates back to three years ago, JTN reported, when Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., insisted on knowing whether his conversations overseas while he was running a campaign for president in 2016 were unmasked by Obama's henchmen.
The answers are being pursued by the Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability, where former House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., is a senior adviser.
Now PPSA has new ammunition to demand details because of the Flynn case, JTN said, in which Grenell released a list of dozens of Obama administration officials who unmasked conversations involving Flynn, who was President Trump's national security adviser.
Former U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell (Facebook)
PPSA has launched a Freedom of Information Act fight over that spying.
"Specifically, the group asked ODNI whether the spy agencies it supervises unmasked the identities of current and past lawmakers known to have been caught up in foreign surveillance, and whether the names of these members were searched through what is known as the 'upstream' phone database. The request covered a bipartisan group of 48 current and former lawmakers and their potential surveillance from Jan. 1, 2008 to Jan. 15, 2020," JTN reported.
The government response has been it cannot answer because whatever it said could "reveal sources and methods information."
If it's true that there's no danger from releasing details about the unmasking of Flynn, "Then it's also true of the senators and congressmen who we believe were unmasked by the intelligence community," Gene Schaerr, PPSA general counsel said, according to the report.
"Thanks to the forthright statements of former Acting Director Grenell, we now know that the ODNI's denial in our case was not to protect intelligence sources or methods. Is this denial designed instead to protect one or more agencies from embarrassment or even from highlighting a violation of the law?" he said.
Meanwhile, Attorney General William Barr appointed Texas U.S. Attorney John Bash to handle a review of unmaskings of Americans during the Obama administration. Barr told lawmakers that Bash has uncovered a "high number" of actions including those "that do not readily appear in the line of normal business."
The issue of spying on Congress is not new. Several years ago, during the Obama administration when John Brennan was the CIA chief, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., accused the CIA of spying on members of the Senate by hacking into computers used by her intelligence committee’s staffers.
At the time, Brennan said, "Let me assure you the CIA was in no way spying on [the committee] or the Senate."
However, a CIA inspector general's report found the CIA was indeed spying on the Senate, and Brennan was forced to privately apologize to intelligence committee members.
More recently, Brennan as is regarded as the architect of the now debunked Trump-Russia collusion claim. But he apparently doesn't understand the foundational premise of the American justice system, innocent until proven guilty.
In an interview with MSNBC's "Morning Joe," he said "people are innocent, you know, until alleged to be involved in some kind of criminal activity."
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