Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Ric Grenell has shared with the Department of Justice the declassified names of Obama administration officials who participated in the “unmasking” of retired General Michael Flynn during the presidential transition in 2016, and their names will reportedly be made public soon.
Several corporate media news sources reported Tuesday that the Department of Justice did not plan to release the declassified documents, but a Fox source clarified that it’s not up to the DOJ to release the docs.
“The Justice Department is confused as to where the idea that we would be releasing this information came from, given that ODNI is the owner of that information, if they want to release it they can do it, that’s their call,” the DOJ official told Fox News’ Brooke Singman.
According to Fox, Grenell is working to declassify four or five batches of other intelligence, and it’s being done in stages. An intelligence source wouldn’t tell Fox whether former President Barack Obama’s name was on the list of officials involved in the improper unmasking, but stressed the list would “make waves.”
Unmasking occurs after a U.S. citizen’s conversations with foreign officials are incidentally picked up because the foreign officials are being monitored by the intelligence community. The U.S. citizen’s identity is protected if his participation is incidental and no wrongdoing is suspected. However, intelligence officials can learn the U.S. citizen’s name through an unmasking process that is supposed to safeguard his rights.
Former Fox News reporter, now independent journalist, Adam Housley, reported on Twitter Tuesday that Brennan hired “contractors” to gather intelligence on U.S. citizens targeted by the Obama regime.
Contractors working for Brennan were gathering the intel. For someone to be unmasked it had to be in an intel report. That’s how they got around the law.
— Adam Housley (@adamhousley) May 12, 2020
As I’m told the list Grenell brought over is much larger than anything involving Flynn. “The exact tasking flow is hard to discern because the stuff was flying everywhere.”
— Adam Housley (@adamhousley) May 12, 2020
“I’m told it could get sticky for John Brennan,” Fox News correspondent Ed Henry told Tucker Carlson Tuesday night.
The 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian interference in 2016 determined that Russia meddled in the election to help candidate Trump.
Documents being declassified will show that former CIA Director John Brennan deliberately suppressed intelligence evidence that indicated Russian President Vladimir Putin preferred “the more predictable and malleable” Hillary Clinton in 2016, according to sources.
Former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz first reported on this last month in an oped at Fox News, and American Greatness covered the story at that time, as well.
“House Intelligence Committee staff told me that after an exhaustive investigation reviewing intelligence and interviewing intelligence officers, they found that Brennan suppressed high-quality intelligence suggesting that Putin actually wanted the more predictable and malleable Clinton to win the 2016 election,” Fleitz wrote.
“I separately have an intelligence source tonight who confirmed that information,” Henry said, adding that rather than issuing a balanced report that reflected all of the intelligence, Brennan “set the narrative that Russia wanted Trump to win.”
Henry told Carlson that the upcoming information “could be a bombshell.”