The point of all this was politics, not national security.
Well, the mystery is solved, at least if you can believe what the usual sieves — those courageously anonymous “former U.S. officials” — have told their notetakers at the Washington Post. As I surmised in last weekend’s column, Michael Flynn was not “unmasked” in connection with his controversial phone call with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. He was never masked in the first place. The Post reported that on Wednesday afternoon.

Meanwhile, the Post is leading the media–Democrat effort to contort the fact that many Republicans were wrong in assuming Flynn had been unmasked prior to his name’s being leaked to the Post in early 2017 into a storyline that those Republicans must have been wrong to claim the leak was illegal. To the contrary, the leak is a felony, regardless of whether an American’s identity should have been concealed. Information collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is classified. The point of classifying information is to keep all of it concealed, not just the names. //

Alas, in this as in so much else throughout the Trump–Russia farce, the Bureau played fast and loose with the rules. When investigators are so inclined, it turns out the privacy vouchsafed by the minimization rules is illusory. FBI officials — if they thought about it at all — figured Flynn need not be masked because they did not see him as an innocent American incidentally caught up in foreign surveillance. They purported to suspect that he was a clandestine agent of Russia. //

Of course, they had no proof of that. And they knew they had no proof. That’s why they never sought a FISA-court warrant targeting Flynn. Doing so would have required showing probable cause that he was an operative of Russia; and as to Flynn, they didn’t even have a fabulist “dossier” to rely on for such a smear. //

We’re being had.

Here’s a more plausible explanation of motive. The Obama administration was actively constructing the Trump–Russia collusion narrative. Obama officials saw Putin’s “no retaliation” pose as an opportunity to float the fiction that the Kremlin had cut a sinister deal with Trump to gut Obama’s sanctions as a reward for Russia’s hacking of Democrats during the campaign. Obama officials and the FBI hoped to conceal the Trump–Russia investigation from the incoming Trump administration for as long as possible, and to continue the investigation of Trump’s campaign — remember, by December 29, they had already gotten a FISA warrant based on the representation that Trump’s campaign had conspired with the Kremlin, and they were preparing to reaffirm that claim in order to get a second 90-day warrant (the second of what would eventually be four). //

On close reading, though, our intelligence agencies reserve the discretion to unmask pretty much whenever they wish. For all the talk, talk, talk about privacy, the pamphlet explains: