Trump’s Probe Into ‘Unmasking’ Conspiracy Ends With No Wrongdoing Found: Report

A federal investigation meant to target Obama administration officials for “unmasking” the names of individuals in classified intelligence reports ended recently without finding any wrongdoing that the Trump administration could use as political ammunition, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

Attorney General William Barr appointed Texas U.S. Attorney John Bash in May to look into the unmasking requests from late 2016 and early 2017, which involved intercepted conversations between Michael Flynn — President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser — and Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. during the 2016 election.

The “unmasking” of names in classified documents is a common, legal practice that allows government officials with proper security clearance to better understand what they’re reading, the Post noted. During the Flynn unmasking, the list of Obama officials involved included Vice President Joe Biden, FBI Director James Comey and director of national intelligence James Clapper.

But Trump has attacked the practice as a conspiracy to undermine his administration.

“No one has ever been criminally prosecuted for unmasking,” Ned Price, a former CIA analyst who worked in the Obama administration, told Reuters at the time of Barr’s announcement. “That would be tantamount to pursuing criminal charges against an intelligence analyst for merely doing his job.”

https://ca.yahoo.com/news/trump-unmasking-flynn-obama-024404364.html