How The Obama Administration Weaponized Surveillance Laws To Target Trump

1. The drip-drip-drip of newly declassified documents related to the Trump-Russia investigation, together with recent reports that a classified leak against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn might not have come from an unmasking request, leaves little doubt that the Obama administration weaponized federal surveillance laws to target Trump associates and undermine the incoming administration.
2. The sheer number of unmasking requests for Flynn, combined with a disturbing pattern of deception by former Obama officials about the unmaskings, raises serious questions about why the outgoing Obama administration was targeting Trump’s incoming national security advisor, and whether it did so as a pretext to continue the Trump-Russia collusion probe after Trump took office.
3. During those weeks, no fewer than 39 Obama administration officials unmasked Flynn, from senior people like Comey and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, to people who had no conceivable reason or unmasking Flynn, like former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power and Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough.
4. The latest declassified document, an email written by former White House National Security Adviser Susan Rice detailing a high-level Oval Office meeting on January 5, 2017, directly implicates then-President Obama and other top officials in the targeting of Flynn, including then-Vice President Joe Biden and fired Federal Bureau of Investigations Director James Comey.
5. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell released a list of former senior Obama administration officials who requested the unmasking of Flynn between Nov.
6. If Obama used intelligence capabilities to spy on the Trump campaign—and gave the green light to Comey to continue spying on the administration after Trump took office—then our intelligence and surveillance laws will need to be reformed to ensure this never happens again.
7. The practice of unmasking became more widespread during the Obama administration and has continued under Trump, although in theory it’s meant to be limited only to situations where intelligence agencies need to know the identity of a U.S. citizen in order to understand the full context or meaning of the intelligence being collected.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/21/how-the-obama-administration-weaponized-surveillance-laws-to-target-trump/