Former Obama aide Ben Rhodes emerges as a person of interest in the unmasking scandal

 As I write every time I do a story on the unmasking scandal, this is one of the aspects of the Russia investigation which has not received the media attention it deserves and it is for obvious reasons–several members of Donald Trump’s campaign team were unmasked during the 2016 election and this does not fit the Trump/Russia collusion narrative so it has been ignored.

  According to this story Ben Rhodes, a former aide to Barack Obama and National Security Adviser is now a person of interest in this scandal. 

  Here is more:

Former Obama White House National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes is now emerging as a person of interest in the House Intelligence Committee’s unmasking investigation, according to a letter sent Tuesday by the committee to the National Security Agency (NSA). This adds Rhodes to the growing list of top Obama government officials who may have improperly unmasked Americans in communications intercepted overseas by the NSA, Circa has confirmed.

The House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-CA, sent the letter to the National Security Agency requesting the number of unmaskings made by Rhodes from Jan. 1, 2016 to Jan. 20, 2017, according to congressional sources who spoke with Circa. Rhodes, who worked closely with former National Security Adviser Susan Rice and was a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications for President Obama, became a focus of the committee during its review of classified information to assess whether laws were broken regarding NSA intercepted communications of President Trump, members of his administration and other Americans before and after the election, according to congressional officials. The committee is requesting that the NSA deliver the information on Rhodes by August, 21.

And now it turns out that hundreds of unmasking requests were made during the 2016 election:

A letter sent last week from Nunes to Dan Coats, the director of National Intelligence, suggested that top Obama aides made hundreds of unmasking requests during the 2016 presidential elections.

But of course they are claiming there is nothing to see here but Devin Nunes is having none of that, here is more:

Nunes told Coats in a letter last week that the committee has “found evidence that current and former government officials had easy access to U.S. person information and that it is possible that they used this information to achieve partisan political purposes, including the selective, anonymous leaking of such information.”

  Ben Rhodes now joins Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and John Brennan on the list of people who may have “improperly” unmasked Americans for purely political reasons. In a way this is reminiscent of Lois Lerner, who admitted to “inappropriately” targeting conservative groups during a previous election cycle. There seems to be a pattern developing  here…

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium