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Then-Deputy Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, shown talking to the White House press corps in December 2016, joins a growing list of former Obama officials under subpoena from the House Intelligence Committee. (Cheriss May/Zuma Press/Newscom)

'Unmasking' Scandal: Day by day, the scandal of the Obama administration's abuse of domestic intelligence gathered by the National Security Agency grows. Forget the phony Russia-Trump collusion charges the Obama White House looks increasingly to have committed a crime by using U.S. intelligence for political purposes.

The NSA's insatiable gathering of data and conversations on Americans make it a potentially highly dangerous enemy of Americans' freedoms. Who would want to have a federal government spy shop that knows almost everything you do in public, on the phone, by email, or by computer?

That's why the super-secret NSA, which is much bigger than the better-known CIA, has always operated under strict guidelines for how its intel could be used. In its reports, Americans who are surveilled without a warrant while speaking to a foreign citizen are routinely "masked" that is, their identity is kept secret unless there's an overwhelming national security interest in that person being "unmasked."

Unfortunately, like a child with a dangerous new toy, the Obama administration apparently seems to have believed that the NSA could be used for narrow, political purposes.

As a result, a number of administration officials and Obama supporters, including former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power and former CIA chief John Brennan, have been subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee to answer some questions.

On Wednesday, the panel announced another subpoena had been issued for a former Obama official, this for former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. Our guess is it won't be the last.

This mega-scandal, by the way, has been building for months, though you would hardly know by the near-silence it's been treated with in the media.

But there are exceptions. Back on May 24, the online journal Circa reported that the scandal was far more serious than it first appeared.

"The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community," wrote Circa investigative reporter Sara A. Carter.

Now, this week, Carter reports that the scandal is much bigger than suspected. A review of government documents found that "government officials conducted 30,355 searches in 2016 seeking information about Americans in NSA intercept meta-data, which include telephone numbers and email addresses," Carter wrote.

She notes that the election-year searches by Obama's political aides and other government officials jumped 27.5% from 2015, tripling the "9,500 such searches" in 2013."In 2016 the administration also scoured the actual contents of NSA intercepted calls and emails for 5,288 Americans, an increase of 13% over the prior year and a massive spike from the 198 names searched in 2013."

Before the Obama administration, under rules propagated by former President George H.W. Bush, "unmasking" incidental intelligence targets was strictly limited and frowned upon. Even after 9/11, despite increased surveillance of people with potential terrorist ties, the rules stayed in place. The potential for abuse, they knew, was too great.

But that ended in 2011 as Obama, using the pretense of fighting a War on Terror that he never even believed in, loosened the rules. As the Washington Examiner reported earlier this week, in 2013 National Intelligence Director James Clapper formally loosened the rules on "unmasking" the names of congressional staffers, elected officials and others.

That major violations occurred under this program seems clear. Last week, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes in a letter to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats noted that "the total requests for Americans' names by Obama political aides numbered in the hundreds during Obama's last year in office and often lacked a specific intelligence community justification," according to The Hill.

In particular, Nunes pointed out that "one official, whose position had no apparent intelligence related function, made hundreds of unmasking requests" in 2016. Speculation is that the official was U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power.

Is this a crime? We do know that the FISA Court, in a closed-door hearing last October, already censured White House officials for their violations of Americans' email privacy, citing an "institutional lack of candor" that had become a "very serious Fourth Amendment issue."

As a reminder, the Fourth Amendment states flatly that "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated ..." Spying on, and then unmasking, hundreds if not thousands of Americans would seem to us to be a brazen violation of the Constitution.

Remember how the media ridiculed and shamed Donald Trump for tweeting out that he had been "wiretapped" by Obama? It's starting to look like that, or something like it, was very much the case.

If it turns out, as some suspect, that the "unmasking" was used for domestic spying on political foes such as Trump, it would constitute a serious crime and would require a special counsel to investigate it.

The immense size of the spying operation and the clear attempt to use the U.S.' intelligence apparatus for questionable personal purposes seems to be at minimum a violation of the law. If it further turns out that there was a coordinated effort by Obama and his aides to use the information in the 2016 presidential campaign, it will be a crime and scandal larger than even Watergate.

Yes, people will go to prison.

Is that what we have here, the political crime of the still-young 21st century? It would be nice if the mainstream media seemed at all interested in answering that question.

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In Abusing NSA Intelligence, Did Obama White House Commit A Crime? - Investor's Business Daily