I’m sure there are more than enough readily-available quips about the eye-rolling “unmasking” “scandal” during the time of COVID. In another era or another mood, I would be the first to indulge in these (and hell, who knows, I still might). Maybe it’s the Attorney General’s disgusting authoritarian leanings, or that this is yet another ‘norm’ that President Trump has chosen to shatter like the bull in the china shop he is, but as of this writing I can’t see through the haze of anger to get to wordplay.
For the uninitiated (which is who the President and his goons are relying on to carry their water with this faux scandal), below is a brief primer, going over the main details:
First, a quick explainer on how the intelligence community (IC) works that is important context for this. Intelligence analysis is often compared to a jigsaw puzzle. Snippets of information, of various degrees of credibility, are collected by the US IC by the terabyte every day– probably every hour, actually. This comes through a variety of ways– human intelligence (HUMINT) via the CIA, signals intelligence (SIGINT) via NSA, open-source (OSINT), geospatial (GEOINT), and several other “INTs”. The IC realizes that they each have their specialty, but, critically, they often cannot put together a concrete report without piecing together multiple pieces from multiple intelligence disciplines and agencies. You will often hear of the “17 members of the intelligence community”, because they typically collaborate to share information that either confirms, denies, or clarifies what the other one has. This is done in a systematic way, and analysts are taught to value objectivity, parsimony, and thoroughness. They are also taught to present their findings in nuanced ways, such as by assigning rough percentages to the likelihood of an event happening, or by presenting minority opinions that could also explain the raw intelligence they’ve collected. These are good practices, that should be encouraged, though they often don’t provide the clients of those intelligence services (policymakers) with the crystal-clear answers they seek. There have been enough high-profile failures of intelligence that were often traced back to an overreliance on a “likely” explanation that ended up being untrue. Just like the 2016 election, though, “unlikely” things still happen occasionally. If there’s a critical sin among the IC, it is in not defending their work regularly or thoroughly enough, which can be forgiven, given the nature of their work. Anyway– it’s a jigsaw puzzle. You intercept a coded phone call from an unknown guy to a Deputy Chief of Mission that hints at the possibility of Event A, and you store it away. Then you read a news report out of that country that could– but doesn’t necessarily– add to the credence of Event A. But could also explain Events B, C, or L– or mean absolutely nothing. Two months later, a human source in that nation’s embassy mentions an internal reorganization of the staff that would allow Event A to happen more easily, something you wouldn’t have considered if you had never heard that first phone call. Is Event A actually happening? Perhaps, and perhaps not. These are the discussions and analysis that the IC conducts every day, and you can see why it requires constant input and re-evaluations to refine any given intelligence assessment. I, for one, hate making decisions with imperfect information, but that is essentially the nature of intelligence. They learn to live in the ambiguities, as most adults do, and they present their findings as such.
So, you can see why those at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)– whose charge is to coordinate among those various agencies with their myriad collection disciplines– would want to know the actual sources. Due to the obviously highly classified nature of the IC’s work, they don’t just casually email stuff around to each other– there is the “need to know” criteria. The DNI exists to be that coordinating mechanism, someone to connect the dots (though the agencies themselves are also empowered to do that). In the case of the “unmasking”, civil liberties also play a role. We have different laws about spying on Americans than we do foreigners, as we should, and in a highly connected world, those can be tough to follow. As such, we have a practice of referring to Americans who happened to get referenced in intelligence assessments on foreign actors (as all intelligence assessments are) with coded phrases a la “Jane Doe”, to protect their identities.
With that context in mind, consider what the IC was faced with in late 2016. Carter Page had been on the FBI’s radar for years before Donald Trump declared his intentions on running for President, due to Page’s shady Russia dealings, and then ends up on the candidate’s staff. Then campaign staffer George Papadopolous drunkenly tells an Australian diplomat that Russia has ill-gotten emails from Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, back-channels are indicating the possibility of coordination between WikiLeaks, Russia, and the Trump campaign, possibly via Roger Stone. Trump himself doesn’t help his case by publicly calling on Russia– joke or not– to help uncover yet more Clinton emails.
If you were an IC analyst, and each of these data points showed up on your radar, what would you think? You might question motivations– would Russia gain anything from tipping the scale in favor of Trump? Obviously, yes. Are the tactics, techniques, and procedures evident in these bits of information consistent with Russian methods? Again, very much yes. Does Russia have the capabilities– diplomatically, financially, technologically– to carry out such an intrusion? Easily, yes. To borrow the old rule-of-thumb for murder investigations, you now have means, motive, and opportunity, along with several pieces of circumstantial evidence. Mind you, there aren’t three separate instances of foreign interference among one candidate’s staff. That alone would be very eyebrow-raising. But they all connect to the same country? And that country is a regular, known adversary of the US? Of course this bears greater scrutiny and sending it up the chain of command! It would be malpractice to NOT look into it more!
But how does one do that? There are (gratefully) more restrictions on collecting information on American citizens. That’s where the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts (FISC) and the applications thereto come in. If the FBI– one of those 17 members of the IC– wants to surveil someone within the US, they must make an appeal to this court to receive a warrant. Now, the critique of the FISC is that they rubber-stamp virtually every application. This is not a new phenomenon, given the dateline on the above-linked article. But that doesn’t mean there’s a “deep-state” fix in for the Trump campaign. The same people crying bloody murder because Carter Page’s FISA was approved on thin or circumstantial evidence never raised a finger in the decades-old history of the FISCs when they were approving near 100% of applications. Is it likely that law-enforcement relies on the secretive nature and possible patriotic zeal of the FISC to push the envelope on investigations that they’d need more evidence for before a conventional judge? Yes, I suspect. But that cuts both ways, and has long been the case.
So, put yourself at the ODNI. You’ve seen multiple intelligence reports more than hinting at coordination between a foreign power– and not one of the friendly ones– and a major presidential campaign. You’re reading the reports and, because this is a very serious issue, alerting your bosses, which include some of the household names the public is familiar with. Those clients, tasked with setting foreign policy and administering the government, see redacted names. The names are redacted, as mentioned earlier, because they are Americans, and so offered a thin veil of privacy unless and until someone needs to know the names. And, as happens virtually every day of the year, those clients do in fact say “can we unmask these names? It would help to know who exactly we’re talking about here”. These people all have TS/SCI security clearances. They all have a need to know. There is even a process and staff in place for conducting this exact ask, it’s not some bizarre violation of norms.
The end result? Some low-level staffer at the agency that created the report sees the unmasking request (on his pile of others like it), checks the actual report, makes sure all the names are cleared to see it, and with a few clicks of the mouse, unredacts the names. After that, and probably a legal review, they send the ‘exposed’ report back up to the requestor. Then they grab lunch at the cafeteria because it’s enchilada day, and sometimes they run out if you get there too late.
To be clear, what actually happened with the unmasking thing was most specifically related to the saga of Michael Flynn. But my point is that in the broader context of several Trump campaign staffers (of which Flynn also was one) being tied to Russian intelligence-gathering operations, it makes even more sense that you’d want to know who the unnamed American in question was, when the summary of the Russian ambassador’s call came across your desk.
Because Donald Trump is closer to a conspiracy-minded shit-poster than an actual President, he has not just raised this issue, but raised it repeatedly. He doesn’t even need to admit that his campaign was aided and infiltrated by Russia– though that would do wonders for our elections’ integrity. He just needs to not create a conspiracy theory out of whole cloth by alleging that the “unmasking” that happened in late 2016 and early 2017 was some bizarre, Luciferean, illegal plot against him. It was entirely routine work conducted by routine, professional analysts. But, he is a narcissist and would rather degrade our country’s democracy, norms, and intelligence community than admit that someone near him may have done something untoward. To that end, and to please his master, Attorney General Bill Barr undertook an investigation of the investigation– in essence, a review to make sure that the counterintelligence investigation conducted by the career staff overseen by the Obama Administration was conducted properly. It is, of course, entirely unnecessary, and simply a political bone thrown to satisfy his boss and keep the QAnon crowd chomping at the bit in the run-up to the 2020 election.
So the next time you hear a blathering, raving-mad person (I won’t call them an idiot, because if they don’t work in this kind of industry, they won’t understand the process) yelling about “unmasking” and calling it a “scandal”, you can tell them to rest assured, it’s not one! And if they don’t take your word for it, just ask the current Attorney General who, try as he might, couldn’t find a single thing wrong with the process to convict one of the supposed “evildoers” that preceded this lawless Administration.