Senator Chuck
Schumer and Congressman Adam
Schiff have both castigated Devin Nunes, the chairman of the
House Intelligence Committee, for his handling of the inquiry into Russia’s
interference in the 2016 presidential election. They should think twice.
The issue that has recently seized Nunes is of vital importance to anyone
who cares about fundamental civil liberties.
The
trail that Nunes is following will inevitably lead back to a particularly
significant leak. On Jan. 12, Washington Post columnist David
Ignatius reported that
“according to a senior U.S. government official, (General Mike) Flynn phoned
Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29.”
From Nunes’s statements,
it’s clear that he suspects that this information came from NSA intercepts of
Kislyak’s phone. An Obama official, probably in the White House,
“unmasked” Flynn’s name and passed it on to Ignatius.
Regardless
of how the government collected on Flynn, the leak was a felony and a violation
of his civil rights. But it was also a severe breach of the public trust.
When I worked as an NSC staffer in the White House, 2005-2007, I read dozens of
NSA surveillance reports every day. On the basis of my familiarity with this
system, I strongly suspect that someone in the Obama White House blew a hole in
the thin wall that prevents the government from using information collected
from surveillance to destroy the lives of the citizens whose privacy it is
pledged to protect.
The
leaking of Flynn’s name was part of what can only be described as a White House
campaign to hype the Russian threat and, at the same time, to depict Trump as
Vladimir Putin’s Manchurian candidate. On Dec. 29, Obama announced sanctions
against Russia as retribution for its hacking activities. From that date
until Trump’s inauguration, the White House aggressively pumped into the media
two streams of information: one about Russian hacking; the other about Trump’s
Russia connection. In the hands of sympathetic reporters, the two streams
blended into one.
A
report that appeared the day after Obama announced the sanctions shows how.
On Dec. 30, the Washington Post reported on a
Russian effort to penetrate the electricity grid by hacking into a Vermont
utility, Burlington Electric Department. After noting the breach, the
reporters offered a senior administration official to speculate on the
Russians’ motives. Did they seek to crash the system, or just to probe
it?
This
infrastructure hack, the story continued, was part of a broader hacking
campaign that included intervention in the election. The story then moved
to Trump: “He…has spoken highly of Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite
President Obama’s suggestion that the approval for hacking came from the
highest levels of the Kremlin.”
The
national media mimicked the Post’s reporting. But there was a problem:
the hack never happened.
It was a false alarm — triggered, it eventually became clear, by Obama’s
hype.
On
Dec. 29, the DHS and FBI published a report
on Russian hacking, which showed the telltale signs of having been rushed to
publication. “At every level this report is a failure,” said cyber security
expert Robert M. Lee. “It didn’t do what it set out to do, and it didn’t
provide useful data. They’re handing out bad information.”
Especially
damaging were the hundreds of Internet addresses, supposedly linked to Russian
hacking, that the report contained. The FBI and DHS urged network
administrators to load the addresses into their system defenses. Some of
the addresses, however, belong to platforms that are widely used by the public,
including Yahoo servers. At Burlington Electric, an unsuspecting network
administrator dutifully loaded the addresses into the monitoring system of the
utility’s network. When an employee checked his email, it registered on
the system as if Russian hackers were trying to break in.
While
the White House was hyping the Russia threat, elements of the press showed a
sudden interest in the infamous Steele dossier, which claimed that
Russian intelligence services had caught Trump in Moscow in highly compromising
situations. The dossier was opposition research paid for by Trump’s
political opponents, and it had circulated for
months among reporters covering the election. Because it was based on
anonymous sources and entirely unverifiable, however, no reputable news
organization had dared to touch it.
With
a little help from the Obama White House, the dossier became fair game for
reporters. A government leak let it be
known that the intelligence community had briefed Trump on the dossier.
If the president-elect was discussing it with his intelligence briefers,
so the reasoning went, perhaps there was something to it after all.
By
turning the dossier into hard news, that leak weaponized malicious gossip. The
same is true of the Flynn-Kislyak leak. Ignatius used the leak to deepen speculation
about collusion between Putin and Trump: “What did Flynn say (to Kislyak),”
Ignatius asked, “and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions?” The mere fact that
Flynn’s conversations were being monitored deepened his appearance of guilt.
If he was innocent, why was the government monitoring him?
It
should not have been. He had the right to talk to in private — even to a
Russian ambassador. Regardless of what one thinks about him or Trump or
Putin, this leak should concern anyone who believes that we must erect a
firewall between the national security state and our domestic politics.
The system that allowed it to happen must be reformed. At stake is
a core principle of our democracy: that elected representatives control the
government, and not vice versa.
Michael Doran is a Senior
Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., specializing in Middle East
security issues. In the administration of President George W. Bush, Doran served
in the White House as a senior director in the National Security Council.
Follow him on Twitter at@Doranimated.
