The Obama unmasking scandal grows

Michael Goodwin:

The number is so large that it explodes everything we were led to believe about how tightly-controlled our government’s surveillance programs are.

The number is 260, and that’s how many times Samantha Power, the ambassador to the United Nations under President Obama, reportedly requested the names of American citizens who were included in intelligence reports covering foreign officials.

The story, by respected Fox News’ journalists Bret Baier and Catherine Herridge, said Power made the requests to “unmask” the 260 names in one year alone, including the period between the presidential election and the inauguration.

The first obvious question is this: Why would she need those names? Power had no operational duties for either intelligence-gathering or counterintelligence investigations, yet her requests apparently were approved.

The second obvious question: what did Power do with those names? Having no clear official reason to get them, any use she made of them would be suspicious and possibly criminal.

It is not a minor point that the names of some people who were involved in President Trump’s campaign or his administration were unmasked and then leaked to the anti-Trump media, which breathlessly reported them as evidence of collusion with Russia and even treason. It is not a stretch to wonder if Power was behind any of those leaks.

While the first two questions go to the heart of the simmering scandal about whether Obama’s FBI targeted Trump and his associates to help elect Hillary Clinton, Question No. 3 is, in its own way, more far-reaching.
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... the media that was so hot and bothered when our intelligence gatherers used international banking regulations to follow terrorist financing, show zero concern when information collected on American citizens by those same techniques becomes public.

Of course, if Trumpsters were the villains instead of the victims, that would be giant news. This is a perfect example of how media bias blinds left-wing news organizations and leads to double standards.
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The problem is narrative based journalism.  Spying on terrorist financing was seen as bad because it could lead to spying on non-terrorists, but when the spying by the Obama administration was on political opponents, it was seen as good because it fit their narrative about the Trump campaign which was based on teh Clinton campaign spin.  Too often it appears that if a story fits the media narrative it is too good to check and too good to look behind the motives of the sources for the story.