Unmasking Flynn: Why it's a very big deal

Because America is a democracy and not a tyranny, despite the best efforts of Democrat politicians to change that, it's not legal for the US Intelligence Community(IC) to spy on Americans without a court order.

But sometimes the IC collects information on US citizens because it's spying on foreigners.  For example the IC vacuumed up the conversation between General Flynn, Trump's national security advisor, and the Russian Ambassador which occurred during the transition phase.

The first thing to note is that transition teams talk to foreigners as they get ready to hit the ground running when the new President is inaugurated.  So Flynn talking to the Russian Ambassador was perfectly legal; any mention of the Logan Act--which is generally considered to be unconstitutional and which hasn't been used to prosecute anyone for over 100 years--is a big lie.

Secondly what Flynn said was that the Russians shouldn't retaliate for sanctions Obama imposed on them.  That's what any American representative should do.  Flynn didn't say that Trump would drop the sanctions unilaterally or offer the Russians any inducement, other than staying in Trump's good graces, if they didn't retaliate.

Hence the call itself was both perfectly legal and expressed an American centric position.

But the IC monitors everything the Russian Ambassador does so they recorded his conversation with Flynn.

The way the IC deals with the problem of accidentally collecting information related to Americans is by masking their identity.  In the transcript of the call Flynn would have been identified as something like American Citizen 32.

However if a member of the government has a compelling national security reason they can ask for the name of the individual in question to be unmasked, ie to be told the real name of American Citizen 32.

Unmasking someone is a very big deal because it amounts to warrantless spying on American citizens.

That's why it's a very big deal indeed that numerous Democrat politicians who had no need to know who American Citizen 32 was asked for and were told that he was General Flynn.

For example among the people who asked were Joe Biden--the VP had no need to know what the Trump transition team was doing--, Obama's UN Ambassador--who had no need to know that
Trump's team was doing or if she did she could have asked--, and the US Ambassador to Italy.

The idea of multiple political actors, not career government employees, effectively using the IC to spy on their political opponents is something we normally associate with a police state not America.

But of course this isn't the first example in the recent past of the Democrats acting as though they were tyrants rather than civil servants and/or elected officials.

We now know beyond any doubt that the sole basis for the FISA warrants that allowed Democrats to use the IC to spy on the Trump campaign was a dossier paid for by Hillary, produced by a foreign national, and containing unverified rumors from anonymous Russian sources.

Further we know that the FBI lied to the FISA court saying that they had validated the dossier's contents when in fact not only hadn't they done so they knew that some of the dossier's contents were wrong.

What both of these cases show is that Democrats are perfectly willing to turn America into a police state where the full power of the IC, which is very powerful because its job is to find out what our enemies are doing, against their political opponents.