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The U.S. chief of intelligence has declassified an Obama-era document related to former President Donald Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in a highly unusual move that sparked allegations of he was trying to discredit the Justice Investigation of the Trump-Russia Department.
Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, declassified the document, a list of Obama administration officials who tried to find out the identities of Trump’s associates swept up in surveillance of foreign officials and turned them over to the Justice Department, the officials said. authorities.
The department does not intend to release him, a senior department official said, and Grenell’s office declined to provide a copy. But Republican politicians could demand that Grenell’s office publish the list.
Grenell’s move came as Trump and his associates have intensified in recent days their efforts to shift public perception of Russia’s investigation from a scandal involving Trump to one involving his predecessor.
They argue that the Obama White House, the FBI, and the media acted inappropriately in trying to learn more about Flynn’s ties to Moscow.
“It’s part of the fight over who controls the narrative of the 2016 election investigation,” said Steven Aftergood, a government ranking expert at the Federation of American Scientists.
“It is putting the focus of attention on the investigators instead of the investigated ones. He is saying that what is irregular here is not extraordinary contacts with the Russian government but the attempt to understand them. ”
The information Mr. Grenell declassified could help a Justice Department prosecutor appointed by Attorney General William Barr to investigate the origins of the Russian investigation.
Prosecutor John H Durham examined the initial leak of information to a Washington Post columnist about late 2016 phone calls between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the United States, officials said.
Durham could use the names on Grenell’s list to identify officials who would have had access to sensitive details about those discussions. The declassification could also allow Trump administration officials to filter the names on the list without violating the laws against disclosure of classified information, the same problem Durham is investigating.
Pleaded guilty
Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about the talks in a case the Justice Department abruptly rejected last week, prompting allegations of politicization by former law enforcement officials.
The withdrawn case ignited an intensified phase of the attacks by Trump and his allies in the Russia investigation. Trump began tweeting on Twitter to tag his counterargument as “Obamagate” and promoted news articles about Grenell’s declassification.
On December 29, 2016, routine American surveillance of Sergey I Kislyak, then Russian ambassador to the United States, engaged in multiple conversations with Flynn. At one point, Flynn asked Russia to refrain from retaliating against Obama administration sanctions imposed as punishment for Moscow’s election interference.
California Republican Devin Nunes, a member of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee who has championed Flynn’s cause, has long said that Obama officials acted improperly by requesting that Trump’s associates be disclosed from of surveillance transcripts.
Trump accused Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s national security adviser, of committing a crime by trying to find out the identities of Trump associates caught up in intelligence surveillance.
Trump has never provided any evidence to back up his claim. Spy agencies hide the names of Americans that spy agencies hide wiretaps from foreign officials to prevent those wiretaps from becoming a tool for inappropriate domestic surveillance, but experts said Ms. Rice’s requests To see them or “unmask them” were justifiable steps.
Highly unusual
Officials must provide a reason to view the information, such as trying to better understand the importance of electronic interception or the strategy of a potentially adversarial government, Aftergood said. But declassifying or publicly revealing which officials make those requests is highly unusual, he added.
Rice has said she does not recall specific details of her requests, according to transcripts of congressional investigators’ questions released last week. But, he said, he was trying to understand Russia’s electoral interference and would have cared about an out-of-government official, as Flynn was at the time, talking to foreign adversaries in a way that could have undermined the administration’s policy in office. .
Republicans have renewed their focus on Ms. Rice in recent days. On Fox News on Monday night, former Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy pointed to a partially declassified memo from Rice, saying that Obama expressed concern about sharing information about Russia with the incoming administration. Gowdy asked that the rest of the memo be declassified and published. – New York Times
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