"OH, THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING": Fascinating Interview Regarding Subpoenas Issued to Obama Cronies

Writing at The Daily Beast, John Batchelor offers a fascinating sitdown with Chairman Devin Nunes of the House Select Intelligence Committee.

The primary topic: the unmasking of Trump campaign officials — like Michael Flynn — by various members of the Obama administration.

Read the entire thing, but some key graphs follow to provide a flavor to the scope and magnitude of the investigation. It’s truly powerful stuff.

The following is Nunes’ verbatim commentary:

The subpoenas [on unmasking the names of Trump aides] actually went to the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI, requesting specifically, of those three individuals that were named, the unmaskings they have done, that they did, from the time period of 2016, the entire year, leading up to Jan. 20 of this year… I can’t get into why we chose those individuals, but clearly this is just further escalation in the concern we have of the unmaskings of Americans by the senior leaders of the Obama administration. Americans that didn’t know about it, and, of course, potentially Trump transition officials…

…Every American is masked. The intelligence agencies are bound by law to mask all American citizens that get picked up in foreign collection. What has to happen, if you want to find out who the American is—there’s a process and procedure in place for that. It’s actually very uncommon in most cases, and seldom happens. But the concern I have had, that I expressed publicly, quite publicly, actually, a couple months ago, was that it became excessive. That Obama administration officials were unmasking people in the Trump transition, and it made me quite uncomfortable…

…We’ve been waiting since March 15 for that information. The intelligence agencies have been slow-rolling us, which is what led to these three subpoenas being issued… So these individuals [Rice, Brennan, Powers] that we named are the ones we have particular interest in, but I can say that those are not the only ones we have interest in…

…look, we want to work with the intelligence agencies. We didn’t want to have to subpoena, but the process was moving way too slowly. So we picked these three individuals whom we have a particular interest in, and hopefully they [the agencies] are expedient. That they have till next week to give us the unmaskings that these three individuals have done. I think they know now that we are serious…

…The big problem here is that the people that run these programs are protecting the United States, protecting U.S. citizens from terrorist attacks, from other adversaries that we have around the globe, and we have to protect American citizens from being picked up in these types of foreign intelligence collections. However, what clearly has happened here—at a minimum—I don’t know if it’s illegal, but it’s clearly an abuse of power, that senior Obama administration officials would unmask someone…

…But also, what is illegal—and I can’t say it was the Obama administration officials who did this—but we know that names were unmasked in intelligence products. And if you believe The Washington Post and The New York Times and NBC News, you know that names [like Michael Flynn] were unmasked, and intelligence was leaked, and Americans that were picked up in intelligence products were leaked out to the media…

…We can’t confirm these stories are true, but if the press reports are true, then clearly people were unmasked out of intelligence products, and leaked out to the media. Which is what? A crime. It’s a crime to do that. So we’re trying to get to the bottom of these crimes, if in fact they were committed…

… I’m not going to get into what I know at this point, but I can tell you we would not be asking this if we didn’t have probable cause that there was an abuse of power…

The subpoenas demand that information be turned over by tomorrow, June 7, 2017.

When asked whether other Obama administration officials would come under scrutiny, Nunes simply replied, “Oh, this is only the beginning.”

Godspeed, Chairman Nunes.

Crimes of this sort, committed by members of any administration — Democrat or Republican — must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Failure to do so is just another step in the direction of a third-world Banana Republic where the powerful can violate the law at will and the peons are prosecuted mercilessly for the same crimes.

Hat tip: BadBlue Real-Time News.