Josh Marshall: "Let's remember what the 'unmasking' scandal is about..."

[Omen78]

21. Mine and your concerns are of no consequence.

If you're looking at where this is probably heading, then the leaking of the unmasked name and contents of the private conversation of a US citizen does become a problem.

Was this "unmasking" illegal?

No. It's common for officials of sufficient seniority. The intelligence agencies get thousands of unmasking requests every year. And the relevant agencies keep records about who makes the requests, as this week's developments have confirmed.

What may have been illegal was when an official in the White House, reviewing these reports and having unmasked Flynn, revealed some of that information to The Washington Post's David Ignatius for a column published Jan. 12, 2017. That sparked the series of events that led to Flynn's defenestration.

Will anyone be charged?

The groundwork has been laid, but it isn't clear if there is any criminal investigation underway.

Investigators, however, could try to use this now-public material to try to link people in the list to Ignatius. Trump has cited what he called the "crimes" from the Obama era and promoted a hashtag, "Obamagate," suggesting that some kind of reckoning might be coming.

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/14/855820024/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-flynn-biden-and-unmasking-story

I was just relaying what I had read on NPR.