It is "appropriate" for Attorney General William Barr to ask U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas John Bash to review "unmasking" activities before and after President Donald Trump's 2016 election, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Thursday.
"These are American citizens, and I think it's appropriate what the attorney general is doing because we need to get to the bottom of this," the California Republican said on Fox News' "America's Newsroom."
Unmasking is the practice of revealing names of Americans who come up during foreign surveillance investigations, and lawmakers want more information on how far the unmasking actions went after a list of officials in former President Barack Obama's administration was released. The documents showed that several Obama officials were involved in seeking the name of the person talking to then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and later leaking that that person was then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
McCarthy said he has several questions about the timing of the unmasking activities, as the requests were sought after Trump's election, when they knew there would be a "new president, a new administration."
"In that little time period, while they [were] still in power in January before the swearing-in of January 20th, [they] spent their time unmasking," said McCarthy, pointing out that then-Vice President Joe Biden was one of the officials.
"Then you moved on to ambassadors, presidents, and others in there, in their daily briefing, asking to unmask individuals who have been going into a new administration that was duly elected," said McCarthy. He added that he's not concerned as a Republican, but as an American who believes in the rule of law, because "that should not happen to any American, [much less an] individual such as Flynn who had served his nation."
Trying to discredit Flynn was "wrong from the start," he added, particularly when that push was using the "power of the Oval Office."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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