Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was ‘unmasking’ at such a rapid pace in the final months of the Obama administration that she averaged more than one request for every working day in 2016 – and even sought information in the days leading up to President Trump’s inauguration, multiple sources close to the matter told Fox News.
Two sources, who were not authorized to speak on the record, said the requests to identify Americans whose names surfaced in foreign intelligence reporting, known as unmasking, exceeded 260 last year. One source indicatedthis occurred in the final days of the Obama White House.
The details emerged ahead of an expected appearance by Power next month on Capitol Hill. She is one of several Obama administration officials facing congressional scrutiny for their role in seeking the identities of Trump associates in intelligence reports – but the interest in her actions is particularly high.
In a July 27 letter to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said the committee had learned “that one official, whose position had no apparent intelligence-related function, made hundreds of unmasking requests during the final year of the Obama Administration.”
The “official” is widely reported to be Power.
During a public congressional hearing earlier this year, Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina pressed former CIA director John Brennan on unmasking, without mentioning Power by name.
Gowdy: Do you recall any U.S. ambassadors asking that names be unmasked?
Brennan: I don’t know. Maybe it’s ringing a vague bell but I’m not — I could not answer with any confidence.
Gowdy continued, asking: On either January 19 or up till noon on January 20, did you make any unmasking requests?
Brennan: I do not believe I did.
Gowdy: So you did not make any requests on the last day that you were employed?
Brennan: No, I was not in the agency on the last day I was employed.
Brennan later corrected the record, confirming he was at CIA headquarters on January 20. “I went there to collect some final personal materials as well as to pay my last respects to a memorial wall. But I was there for a brief period of time and just to take care of some final — final things that were important to me,” Brennan said.
Former national security adviser Susan Rice (Reuters)
Three of the nation’s intelligence agencies received subpoenas in May explicitly naming three top Obama administration officials: Former national security adviser Susan Rice, Brennan and Power. Records were requested for Ben Rhodes, then-President Barack Obama’s adviser, but the documents were not the subject of a subpoena.
Asked for comment on Wednesday, a spokesman for Power had nothing further to add. But on Thursday, the spokesman provided this statement to Fox News:
“The anonymously sourced reports about Ambassador Power’s intelligence requests are false. Ambassador Power looks forward to engaging the bipartisan Committee in the appropriate classified forum.”
During congressional testimony since the unmasking controversy began, National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers has explained that unmasking is handled by the intelligence community in an independent review.
“We [the NSA] apply two criteria in response to their request: number one, you must make the request in writing. Number two, the request must be made on the basis of your official duties, not the fact that you just find this report really interesting and you’re just curious,” he said in June. “It has to tie to your job and finally, I said two but there’s a third criteria, and is the basis of the request must be that you need this identity to understand the intelligence you’re reading.”
Previous U.N. ambassadors have made unmasking requests, but Fox News was told they number in the low double digits.
Power has agreed to meet with the Senate and House intelligence committees as part of the Russia probe. She is expected before the House committee in a private, classified session in October.
Bret Baier is the Chief Political Anchor of Fox News Channel, and the Anchor & Executive Editor of “Special Report with Bret Baier.” His book, “Three Days in January: Dwight Eisenhower’s Final Mission,” (William Morrow) is on sale now.
Catherine Herridge is an award-winning Chief Intelligence correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC) based in Washington, D.C. She covers intelligence, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Herridge joined FNC in 1996 as a London-based correspondent.
Rod Rosenstein needs to be investigated also. He looks like a child molester.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein approved an application to extend surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page shortly after taking office last spring, according to the New York Times.
That is one of the revelations in a memo compiled by House Intelligence Committee staffers that is set to be released within weeks, according to “three people familiar with it” who spoke to the Times.
The memo is expected to detail abuses by senior FBI officials in their investigation of the Trump campaign, which began the summer of 2016.
The House Intelligence Committee could vote to release the memo as early as Monday. It would give President Trump five days to object; otherwise, the memo will be released.
Democrats, as well as the Justice Department, have warned that releasing the memo to the public would be “extraordinarily reckless,” although the leaks of the memo to the Times makes those claims dubious.
Democrats have also claimed that the memo, which summarizes classified information held by the Justice Department, is misleading and paints a “distorted” picture, and they have prepared their own counter memo they want to release.
The people who spoke to the Times argued that Rosenstein’s renewal of a spy warrant on Carter Page, Trump’s former campaign foreign policy adviser, “shows that the Justice Department under President Trump saw reason to believe that the associate, Carter Page, was acting as a Russian agent.”
The memo, however, is expected to detail how the surveillance warrant was initially obtained inappropriately using the Trump dossier — a political document funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
It is expected to show that FBI and DOJ officials did not explain to the secret court granting spy warrants that the dossier was politically fueled opposition research. To obtain the warrant, the officials needed to show “probable cause” that Page was acting as an agent of Russia.
Page joined the campaign in March 2016, around the time the team was under pressure to release names of foreign policy advisers.
The former investment banker and Navy officer took a personal trip to Moscow to deliver a speech at a graduation ceremony in July 2016, which fueled nascent allegations that Trump was somehow colluding with Russia. Page left the campaign in September.
The Trump dossier claimed he met with two high-level Russian officials on that trip, despite no evidence of it and Page’s testimony under oath that he never met with them. Page has sued BuzzFeed for publishing the dossier.
The FBI had been tracking Page, who was previously based in Moscow, since 2013, but was never charged with any wrongdoing. The FBI reportedly received the surveillance warrant on him in fall of 2016, but Page had left the campaign by then.
Rosenstein, after he was confirmed as the deputy attorney general in late April 2017, approved renewing the surveillance warrant, according to the Times. When Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey in May, Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller to lead a special counsel.
Rosenstein has been in charge of the Russia investigation since Attorney General Jeff Session recused himself.
CNN Botches Major ‘Bombshell’ Alleging Contacts Between Don Jr. And WikiLeaks
CNN misreported key details of an offer made to Donald Trump Jr. last year of a batch of stolen Wikileaks documents.
The story, which CNN published on Friday and covered extensively on TV, was touted as the first evidence that the Trump campaign was given a heads-up about documents stolen from Democrats.
But the story appears to have been riddled with errors, while also lacking key context.
Perhaps the most jarring error in the CNN report is the date on which Trump Jr. was sent the email. The network reported that a person named Mike Erickson emailed Trump Jr. and others on the Trump campaign on Sept. 4, 2016, with a link to Wikileaks documents as well as a decryption key to access them.
The email also offered access to emails that had been stolen from former Sec. of State Colin Powell, according to CNN.
But a copy of the email provided to The Daily Caller shows that Erickson sent the email on Sept. 14.
That date is significant because WikiLeaks had released a batch of stolen documents on Sept. 13. The group touted its release of the DNC documents, which were published by Guccifer 2.0.
The email shows that Erickson messaged Trump Jr. stating that “Wikileaks has uploaded another (huge 678 mb) archive of files from the DNC.”
“It is too big for me to send you by e-mail attachments, but you can download it yourselves,” he added, providing a link to the same website cited by Wikileaks the day before.
He also included a link to a decryption key that could be used to access the documents.
The Washington Post first reported on the true date and wording of the Erickson email.
The site that Erickson linked to leads to a page where a file with the same file name referenced in the Wikileaks tweet could be downloaded.
Powell’s emails were also published online on Sept. 13. DC Leaks, a group that has been affiliated with the Russian government, published the documents online. The group granted access to the documents to several news organizations, including The Daily Caller. How CNN got its report so wrong is unclear.
The article states that its information was based on a read-out of the Trump Jr. email provided by an unnamed source. Trump Jr.’s lawyer, Alan Futerfas, speculated on Friday that the source was on the Democratic side of the House Intelligence Committee, which interviewed Trump Jr. earlier this week.
Erickson also appears not to be a super-secret Kremlin agent. The Post identified him as the president of an aviation management company.
Attempts made by The Daily Caller to contact him were unsuccessful.
Futerfas, the lawyer for Trump Jr., said that the real estate executive received “tons of unsolicited emails” during the campaign.
“The email was never read or responded to — and the House Intelligence Committee knows this,” he said in a statement.
“This email arrived after published media reports disclosed 12 hours earlier that hacked documents had been posted. The suggestion that this information was not public is false.”
Futerfas blasted the House Intelligence Committee over what he says is its leak of the story.
“It is profoundly disappointing that members of the House Intelligence Committee would deliberately leak a document, with the misleading suggestion that the information was not public, when they know that there is not a scintilla of evidence that Mr. Trump Jr. read or responded to the email,” he said.
GOP preps contempt resolution for top FBI, DOJ officials after missed Monday deadline
The House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday will begin writing a resolution holding top FBI officials in contempt of Congress after the agency missed a Monday deadline to turn over key evidence the committee has been seeking for months.
“We are moving forward with the contempt resolution,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., told the Washington Examiner Tuesday morning. He added that the panel is still negotiating with FBI and Justice Department officials to get the requested documents.
Nunes has accused the FBI and Department of Justice of a “months-long pattern … of stonewalling and obstructing this committee’s oversight work.”
Those accusations boiled over during the weekend, after stories were leaked to the New York Times and Washington Post saying that FBI agent Peter Strzok, a key investigator in the Trump-Russian probe, was removed from the Russia probe after exchanging text messages critical of Trump to another FBI agent he was involved with romantically. Republicans had been seeking information about why he was removed, but were never told anything by FBI or Justice Department directly.
Nunes had also been seeking information about the FBI and Justice Department’s use of the Steele dossier, which contains damning but unverified information about President Trump.
But the Strzok leak was the last straw, and Nunes announced Saturday he has ordered committee staff to begin drafting a contempt of Congress citation for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and for FBI Director Christopher Wray unless they complied with the panels’ requests for information by the close of business on Monday.
After the story broke, Nunes said, the FBI and Justice Department agreed to make some of the witnesses available, but are still withholding many documents and other evidence the Intelligence panel is seeking, an aide said.
Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said the department has given the panel hundreds of pages of classified documents and multiple briefings, and has now allowed Strzok and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to meet with the panel.
While committee aides will start writing the contempt resolution Tuesday, Nunes has not set a date for the panel to consider the contempt charges.
If approved by the committee, the resolutions of contempt would be sent to the House floor for consideration, but only if Speaker Paul Ryan chooses to bring them up. One GOP source said Ryan supports the contempt resolution.
Contempt of Congress resolutions approved by the House are referred to the the Justice Department, but they are relatively rare.
The House voted in 2012 to hold then U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for withholding documents sought by the House Oversight Committee on the DOJ’s “Fast and Furious” operation that resulted in thousands of U.S. guns ending up in the hands of Mexican drug dealers.
These resolutions also are not always effective. For example, the Justice Department elected not to prosecute Holder over the contempt charge.
She says Trump has balls this big… So I wanted to take him down because I hate the Richard damit!
Obama official Samantha Power agrees to testify before House intel panel
Former Obama official Samantha Power, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has agreed to testify before the House intelligence committee as part of its Russia probe, Fox News has learned.
Power will join the roster of former Obama administration officials in testifying before the congressional panel as part of their probe into Russian meddling and potential collusion with Trump campaign officials in the 2016 presidential election.
Some lawmakers also want to hear from Obama administration officials over their potential role in “unmasking” the identities of Trump associates from intelligence reports last year. Power and former national security adviser Susan Rice are among the former officials who could face such questions.
Rice initially had been expected to testify at a closed-door session Tuesday before the same House panel, but is instead expected to speak to lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee later this week.
Power, though, has agreed to engage with the House committee, a spokesman for the former ambassador told Fox News.
“Ambassador Power strongly supports any bipartisan effort to investigate and address Russia’s interference in our electoral process and she wanted to engage both House and Senate Committees charged with investigating it,” David Pressman, counsel to Power and partner at Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, told Fox News. “Ambassador Power is very much looking forward to providing any assistance and encouragement she can to bipartisan efforts aimed at addressing this serious threat to our nation’s security.”
A date for Power to testify has yet to be confirmed, and a source close to the committee told Fox News it will not be this week.
Several other Obama officials are making an appearance on Capitol Hill this week to testify behind closed doors.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared before both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on Monday.
Former White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough will also testify this week, Fox News was told.
All sessions with former Obama administration officials are set to be closed, according to sources on Capitol Hill.
Breaking: Judicial Watch Sues CIA, DOJ and Treasury For Records Related To Flynn Leaks
Conservative Watchdog Group Requests Investigation Into Top House Intel Democrats
Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch on Friday called for a preliminary investigation into two top Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee for potentially disclosing classified information to the public in violation of House ethics rules.
Judicial Watch has requested the Office of Congressional Ethics to look into whether Vice Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) broke House ethics rules for disclosing classified information to the public, with which left-wing groups have targeted its Republican chairman.
Last month, progressive groups MoveOn.org and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) requested an investigation into Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) after they said he had done the same thing.
Nunes temporarily stepped aside from leading a high-profile probe into Russia’s involvement into the U.S. presidential elections while the Office of Congressional Ethics is looking into whether any rules were broken.
Judicial Watch noted this double-standard in its request:
If the standard for filing a complaint or opening an ethics investigation is that a member has commented publicly on matters that touch on classified information, but the member does not reveal the source of his or her information, then the complaints against Chairman Nunes are incomplete insofar as they target only Nunes.
At least two other members of the House Intelligence Committee have made comments about classified material that raise more directly the very same concerns raised against Chairman Nunes because they appear to confirm classified information contained in leaked intelligence community intercepts.
The left-wing groups filed their complaint against Nunes after he told reporters on March 22 that he had seen evidence that the intelligence community had incidentally collected information about Trump transition team members, and that the information was widely disseminated and their names unmasked.
Judicial Watch noted that Schiff had spoken to an audience at the Brookings Institution the day before, on March 21, appearing to confirm a leaked December 29 conversation between incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
“And then you have leaks that expose malfeasance or illegality. Now, I put that kind of leak, I put the Flynn leak in that category,” Schiff had said.
Judicial Watch also cites an April 3 Daily Caller story in which Speier, a committee member, appeared to confirm the contents of that call.
“Ambassador Kislyak and General Flynn were freelancing sanctions relief at the end of December, when he had no portfolio in which to make any kind of negotiations with Ambassador Kislyak,” the Daily Caller reported she said.
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said in a statement, “At least two leading Democrats, Reps. Schiff and Speier, on the House Intelligence Committee, seem to have improperly disclosed classified information.”
“While the Ethics Committee examines Rep. Nunes’s innocuous statements on Obama’s surveillance on the Trump team, it ought to expand its investigation to include the other members of the Intelligence Committee who seem to have flagrantly violated the rules.”
The committee’s former chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) also called for Schiff to recuse himself from the Russia probe in a CNN op-ed earlier this month, for discussing classified information in public.
Schiff said he did not think Roger’s request “is a serious one.”
