Let's be clear: This is bonkers. No such NSA program exists, nor could it exist, legally. NSA has no domestic intelligence mission, it is a FOREIGN intelligence agency.
While NSA+CYBERCOM have a role now in protecting the integrity of our elections, that is a defensive mission aimed at deterring and diminishing HoIS operations against US campaigns and the election itself...that has NOTHING to do with the actual voting process or counting votes.
Lt Gen (ret) McInerney was a USAF pilot a long time ago. He knows no more about IC ops than an average citizen on the street, much less about NSA + CYBERCOM activities. This is dangerous nonsense.
Please pay attention to what NSA & CYBERCOM are saying about election security. It's not 2016 anymore. They're devoting enormous effort to maintaining the integrity of our elections ===>
“Our 1 one goal, our number 1 objective at NSA & CYBERCOM, is a safe secure and legitimate 2020 election. How are we going to do that?...We’re going to know our adversaries better than they know themselves.”
With this retweet Trump has really outdone himself.
This is almost too perfect for words.
Who is this Blumenthal guy? Which one, you ask?
Let me explain...
Gotta love the irony: Max's father Sid Blumenthal (remember him? you should...) has spent the last 3 years trying to stand up every last morsel of the Steele Dossier and prove Donnie is an SVR agent....
Meanwhile Sid's Lefty spawn pushes the Kremlin line nonstop (and Assad's too, because of course) and says this is all a Deep State conspiracy. Even Dr Freud would say this is too on-the-nose for him...
Unlike 99.999% of the people commenting on this story I've actually done SIGINT "unmaskings" for NSA, which makes me what @RadioFreeTom would call an Expert, so I have a couple comments on this story...
1st, Mike Flynn's notorious call to RU Amb Kislyak, which got this whole furball rolling, was on 29 DEC 2016...and a lot of these unmasking requests are wayyyyy before that. Back to 30 NOV, in fact.
Hmmmmm.....
2nd, this looks like a very normal unmasking request list, given what we know Flynn was talking about during the transition and with whom (ie RU, TU). There are all pretty senior policymakers or IC personnel -- some indeed very senior -- not random GS-13s....
@PikeGrey1418 Ludendorff blamed Vienna ("shackled to a corpse" etc) for his own lack of any strategic vision or ability to win the war. When blaming Austria-Hungary for Germany's defeat no longer worked, he moved on to blaming the Jews.
IRGC-QF has a long history in the Balkans and Soleimani was in Bosnia during the 1992-95 war -- along with several thousand other Iranian spies and paramilitary operatives-cum-terrorists.