WASHINGTON (AP) — President Trump and his Republican allies are misrepresenting the facts in the legal case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn as they concoct charges of improper behavior during the Obama administration to use in this year’s presidential campaign.
Calling his unspecified allegations "Obamagate," Trump alleges conspiracies against him in 2016 and suggests the disclosure of Flynn's name as part of legal U.S. surveillance of foreign targets was criminal and motivated by partisan politics. There is no evidence of that.
In fact, the so-called unmasking of Americans’ names like Flynn’s is legal.
Over the weekend, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro also alleged without evidence corruption involving Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's son, Hunter, in China. And in an interview rebroadcast Sunday, Trump mischaracterized messages between FBI employees to suggest a post-2016 election plot to get him.
Meanwhile, Trump continued to spread falsehoods about the availability of tests for the coronavirus in the United States and exaggerated the scope of his travel restrictions on China.
Here is a look at the recent political rhetoric and reality:
Michael Flynn
TRUMP: "OBAMAGATE!" — tweet Saturday
TRUMP: "Biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the USA." — tweet Thursday
THE FACTS: He's making an unsupported claim that former President Barack Obama broke the law.
Trump and his supporters have made the unmasking of Flynn one of their major talking points, claiming that it proves the Obama administration unfairly and illegally targeted Flynn and other Trump associates.
But there is nothing illegal about unmasking. The declassified document states that the unmasking requests were approved through the National Security Agency's "standard process."
Lat week, when Trump was asked by reporters to define Obama's criminal offense in the alleged "Obamagate," Trump failed to articulate one.
"You know what the crime is," he said last Monday to a Washington Post reporter. "The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours."
During routine surveillance of foreign targets, names of Americans occasionally come up in conversation, either because the foreigner is talking to or about them. For privacy reasons, those names are generally concealed, or masked, before the intelligence is distributed to administration officials. U.S. officials can ask the agency that collected the intelligence to unmask the name if they think it is vital to understanding the intelligence.
While Trump casts unmasking as sinister, the number of identities unmasked in response to such requests has actually increased during the first years of the Trump administration from the final year of the Obama administration.
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SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM, Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee: "The unmasking of General Flynn by the Obama Administration regarding conversations during the presidential transition are deeply troubling and smell of politics, not national security." — statement Wednesday
THE FACTS: There is nothing from newly released material that suggests the unmasking requests were rooted in politics rather than national security.
There were indeed multiple Obama administration officials, including then-Vice President Biden, who asked the NSA to disclose the name of an American whose identity was concealed in intelligence reports. That American was revealed to be Flynn.
But there's nothing inherently unusual about the requests, and the documents released by the Trump administration say the people who made the requests were authorized to receive the underlying intelligence reports.
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SEN. RAND PAUL, R-KY: "But it should be and is illegal to listen to an American's conversation. And it's even worse if you're listening to an American who just happens to be your political opponent from the opposite party." — interview Wednesday on Fox News Channel
THE FACTS: It is not illegal to listen to an American's conversations, and law enforcement officials do it routinely with a warrant or court order. But in any event, that's not what happened here.