OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Newly obtained documents indicate that then-outgoing President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and their administration sought to hamper the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump in significant ways.
According to The Daily Signal, which obtained the documents via a Freedom of Information Act request made to the National Security Agency (NSA) two years ago, “show how much the D.C. elites feared” Trump, the Western Journal reported.
“In the 217 redacted pages, we see the coalescing of the effort to smear the incoming president as a Russian agent,” the outlet noted further.
According to The Daily Signal: “The documents reveal that Obama administration officials, from Vice President Joe Biden down to several ambassadors and many officials in the Treasury and Energy departments, gained access to secret information about Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, President-elect Trump’s choice for national security adviser.”
The documents obtained by The Daily Signal consist of unprocessed data encompassing requests and various correspondences exchanged between these officials and the National Security Agency (NSA) from late November 2016 to early January 2017. Additionally, the collection encompasses emails exchanged among NSA officials explaining the rationale behind the sharing of this information, the outlet noted further.
Trump unexpectedly defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who was widely expected to easily slide into the Oval Office and continue Obama’s far-left agenda.
In May 2020, Rick Grenell, who was serving as the acting Director of National Intelligence at the time, declassified pertinent information and furnished Congress with a roster of individuals implicated in the “unmasking” of Flynn, a former Army three-star general who served as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency under Obama.
Republican Sens. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin released the list of Obama officials.
The outlet continued:
Through the Freedom of Information Act, The Daily Signal sought records of requests by top Obama administration officials to “unmask” Flynn—that is, to disclose that the incoming national security adviser is a person mentioned in reports of foreign surveillance.
Flynn was the American whose phone conversation with the Russian ambassador between Trump’s November 2016 election and January 2017 inauguration had been intercepted by intelligence officials in the Obama administration.
“Three top Obama administration officials who gained access to the Flynn information are now high-ranking officials in the Biden administration,” The Daily Signal added.
“Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff for his entire second term, is now secretary of veterans affairs under Biden,” the report said. “Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, made numerous requests for information on Flynn. In the Biden administration, Power is the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“And Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, deputy secretary at Obama’s Energy Department, has been Biden’s homeland security adviser since he took office,” the outlet continued.
The Flynn-related unmasking requests from Obama officials were all made in late November and through December 2016, the report added.
Trump handpicked Flynn as his initial national security adviser. The act of “unmasking” Flynn, carried out at the behest of certain advisers close to Obama, triggered a sequence of events that ultimately resulted in Flynn’s resignation a mere 23 days into his tenure within the new Trump administration.
Furthermore, the incident played a significant role in the now-discredited investigation into allegations of Trump-Russia collusion aimed at influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
“Trump pardoned Flynn in late 2020, and a federal judge soon dropped charges alleging Flynn made false statements to the FBI in the early days of the Trump administration,” The Daily Signal noted further.
In March, Flynn lauded House conservatives for pushing Speaker Kevin McCarthy to adopt what he sees as a key rule change in exchange for their support.
Specifically, he praised the group of Freedom Caucus members for extracting a pledge from the California Republican to establish a committee tasked with examining the alleged politicization of the Justice Department and FBI against Americans with certain political and cultural viewpoints.
He honed in on a rule he believes “could give us one more opportunity to restore much of our constitutional republic,” and “could lead to the exposure of the long train of abuses that have been visited on Americans by a politicized FBI, Justice Department, and the larger security state.”
