Fred, I should have seen this coming. You've resorted to the last tool of the witless: the ad hominem attack. The only organizations of which I'm a "card carrying" member are the Pa. Bar and the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. I am an independent, /1
a Senior Fellow @fpri, and a member of the Advisory Council at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) at Penn Law School. The latter strikes me as an organization focused on topics (Ethics and the Rule of Law) particularly antithetical to Trump zealots - /2
and you're proving my point. I don't need a political axe to grind with this president - the fact that he is a boorish, obnoxious narcissist concerned with no one but himself and his sycophants is quite enough. /3
As far as the apocryphal "unmasking" scandal on which you're myopically focused: in 2016, there were 1,934 § 702 Reports where an initially "masked" USP was "unmasked" per request. That's over 150 per month. The NSA memo that Grenell declassified shows 41 requests to unmask /4
Flynn from Nov. 8 through the end of 2016 - there is simply nothing unusual about those numbers, nothing to justify your call for NSA "whistleblowers" (an especially ironic request coming from a Trump devotee like you). So, the explanation that you demand from me is /5
that there wasn't anything on which to blow the whistle (unlike, for example, a certain phone call to the president of Ukraine). Oh, and by the way, the counting mechanism used in the DNI Statistical Transparency Reports for "unmasking" requests changed somewhat in 2017, /6
but I can't help but note that, in the first year of the Trump Administration, the # of "unmasking" requests totaled 9,529 - which was actually a few hundred more than during the comparable 12-month period for the last year of the Obama Administration. /7
