The following article by Spencer Ackerman was posted on the Daily Beast website June 7, 2018:
Obama aide Ben Rhodes writes that he learned about Mike Flynn’s parley with the Russian ambassador not from ‘unmasked’ surveillance intercepts but from Trump’s own people.
The Trump transition team told Barack Obama’s White House about Mike Flynn’s fateful conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, according to a senior Obama aide’s new memoir. That account stands in contrast to oft-repeated claims that the Obama team unmasked Flynn’s name after learning of the Kislyak conversation from surveillance intercepts.
Ben Rhodes, an Obama deputy national security adviser and a long-time right-wing bête noire, often features prominently in accusations from Donald Trump’s allies that the outgoing White House improperly “unmasked” Flynn from surveillance intercepts and then leaked his name to discredit him. In October, Rhodes testified behind closed doors to the House intelligence committee probe controlled by Trump ally Devin Nunes about unmasking.
But in his just-released book, The World as It Is, the former senior National Security Council staffer writes that the Obama White House learned about the Flynn-Kislyak talks from the Trump team itself. If Rhodes’ claim is true, then Obama aides had no need to “unmask” any surveillance intercept of Kislyak’s phone calls to determine Flynn was the interlocutor. Continue reading “New Book: Trump Team, Not Deep State, Revealed Flynn’s Talks With Russians”