Samantha Power was “the largest unmasker of US persons in our country’s history,” then-Rep. Trey Gowdy said in October 2017, when he was interviewing her during the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia probe.
As US ambassador to the United Nations, she made hundreds of “unmasking” requests during the final year of the Obama administration, although her post had no obvious intelligence function.
She asked that the identity of Gen. Michael Flynn be revealed in classified intelligence reports seven times between Election Day 2016 and the inauguration of President Trump on Jan. 20, 2017, although she testified later of having “no recollection” of the requests.
“Now, did I have a significant appetite for intelligence? I do,” Power told Gowdy.
No kidding.
Not that she was alone. We now discover, thanks to a document declassified by the nation’s intelligence chief, that more than three dozen members of the Obama administration, including Joe Biden, also had an unhealthy obsession with unmasking Flynn.
After this flurry of activity, it was only a matter of time before someone leaked Flynn’s name to the Washington Post, providing the pretext for the infamous FBI “setup” interview that led to his resignation after just 24 days as national security adviser and sparking the Russia-collusion fantasy that hobbled the Trump administration before it began.
The presidential transition is supposed to be a peaceful handover of power from one administration to the next, but in the 10 weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day, something went very badly wrong.
In the words of Rep. Devin Nunes, Obama’s people “went wild after Trump won. They got poisoned with this Russia hoax … They were just unmasking and then leaking out about anyone within the Trump campaign and the Trump transition team.”
In a parliamentary system such as Britain’s, a new prime minister can show up for work the day after the election, and in other democracies, a period of caretaker government limits the powers of the “lame duck” administration.
But in America, there is a remarkable period of almost three months during which an unscrupulous administration can plant landmines for its successor to step on.
And that, as becomes clearer each day, is what happened to the Trump administration.
The threat for the Obamaites wasn’t that Republicans were returning temporarily to office. It was that the barbarian Trump uniquely imperiled their entire progressive agenda.
But they wasted little time wailing and rending their garments. Being professional community activists, they turned their emotions into action.
They did what they regarded as their patriotic duty: bedeviling Trump before he set foot in the Oval Office.
So, in their last days in power, they used the intelligence agencies to trawl for dirt, which they wove into a barely plausible narrative that Trump was an “asset” of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Then someone leaked this nonsense, along with the salacious contents of the fictional Steele dossier, to a weaponized media. They then sat back and savored the hounding of their nemesis. The “Resistance” was born.
No wonder Power, an Irish-born activist journalist who became an Obama devotee, was weirdly Zen about Trump’s victory when interviewed by the Irish Times in November 2017. She said she was comforted by the “checks and balances kicking in” to constrain Trump, the courts blocking his policies and the women becoming “triggered by his vulgarity and cruelty.”
Like her former colleagues, Power also kicked along the Russia-collusion tale any chance she got.
“Putin has got a very high return on his investment,” she told Stephen Colbert on CBS in December 2017.
Yet two months earlier, she had testified in the House Intelligence Committee that she had seen no evidence of Russian collusion.
It was the same with Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper.
As a paid CNN contributor, Clapper repeatedly declared that Trump was a Russian “asset.”
Yet, under oath in July 2017, he told the committee: “I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting [or] conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”
As a paid MSNBC contributor, Obama’s mendacious CIA Director John Brennan labeled Trump “treasonous” and “wholly in the pocket of Putin.”
But last March, after the Mueller investigation found no Russia collusion, he told MSNBC he might have “received bad information … I think I suspected there was more than there actually was.” Sure.
Barack Obama, whose administration turned spying on American citizens into an art form, has remained serenely above the fray until now, when the only thing standing between Trump and a second term is a sleepy guy in a basement.
During two virtual commencement speeches over the weekend, Obama fashioned the attack lines the Democrats will use during the campaign.
“This pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing,” he said. “A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.”
The pandemic works electorally for the Democrats in three ways:
It has crippled Trump’s greatest asset, the economy; it offers the opportunity for the socialist transformation that often follows a war; and it allows them to keep hiding Biden in the basement.
They plan to hang every coronavirus death around the president’s neck, keep people locked down as long as possible and then blame him for the ailing economy.
But the landmines they planted for Trump in the transition are about to blow up on them.
Justice for Thomas at long last
The Clarence Thomas documentary “Created Equal,” to be aired on PBS Monday night, is mandatory viewing if you want to understand the character deficits of Joe Biden.
It also pays due homage to one of the greatest living Americans, the impoverished son of a single mother in the segregated South, who was raised by his formidable grandfather, became a Marxist radical at Yale Law School and rose to the Supreme Court.
Through the centerpiece of the explosive Anita Hill testimony at his 1991 Senate confirmation, the documentary aims a dagger at the hypocrisy of liberals on race and sex.
Biden, of course, presided over the Senate hearing, which Thomas famously dubbed a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.” Sitting next to his fellow traveler in moral rectitude, Sen. Ted Kennedy, Biden was feckless, clueless and totally outclassed by Thomas.
Asked about the attacks on him that continue to this day, Thomas says they’re just “a tactic.”
“If you criticize a black person who’s more liberal, you’re racist, but you can do anything to me or … Ben Carson.”
His tormentors don’t realize that their time will come, that they’re “the next to be in the Tower of London [where] there’s a lot of tarring and feathering” to go around, he says.
The film was made before Biden faced the Tara Reade allegations, but there is a certain karmic justice in the timing.
Time for FBI to shape up
The FBI needs to get with the 21st century and start digitally recording its interviews. The farce of the “302” — the FBI’s primitive method of memorializing what was said in an interview, based on handwritten notes and post-hoc editing — has been highlighted by the Michael Flynn case. It just looks like a way for the FBI to avoid accountability.