'Unmasker in Chief' Samantha Power spewed anti-Trump bias in government emails
BY JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 06/26/19 04:15 PM EDT

The Hill > https://thehill.com/opinion/wh...p-bias-in-government
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"Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power may share an unflattering stage with a text-loving FBI agent and his Donald Trump-hating paramour from the bureau.

Fired agent Peter Strzok and ex-FBI lawyer Lisa Page are infamous today for texting on FBI phones their anti-Trump sentiments while allegedly having an affair. They played key roles in the now-debunked Russia collusion investigation.

It turns out that Power — the diplomat whose authority inexplicably was used to unmask hundreds of Americans’ names in secret intelligence reports during the 2016 election — engaged in similar Trump-bashing on her official government email, according to documents unearthed by an American Center for Law and Justice lawsuit. The conservative legal group is run by Trump defense attorney Jay Sekulow." ...........


................"Power and her staff spent time brainstorming a possible CBS “60 Minutes” interview as Trump’s transition period began. The idea was to parlay Power’s remarks at an upcoming citizenship event and the TV news magazine interview into forums to shame the president-elect on immigration."

“Ambassador: Have a draft for your remarks for the naturalization ceremony on Tuesday, which has proven a useful and somewhat cathartic vessel to channel some post-Trump messages about who we are,” fellow State Department official Nikolaus Steinberg wrote on Nov. 11, 2016.

Power responded: “Need to move out on 60 mins idea to seek maximum amplif.”

Soon, CBS’s Bill Owens, then executive editor of “60 Minutes,” and Power’s staff exchanged a series of emails about how a prospective interview could include the Syrian refugee crisis to focus attention on Trump’s immigration stance.

“We think they might still be interested because this shows the flip side of the story, how refugees are actually contributing to American communities, with the hook being the foreshadowing that Trump and Company may try to undo all this,” Steinberg wrote Power."......



..............."At first blush, the Power emails may seem to be nothing more than political screeds from government elitists exhibiting their disbelief that America elected Trump. But the president’s defenders and congressional investigators see reason for concern.

“The sheer political panic evidenced in Samantha Power’s emails shows that ‘the fix was in’ against the incoming administration even before the 45th president was sworn into office,” said Sekulow, one of Trump’s lawyers and founder of the center that successfully sued to obtain the documents.

One thing clear from Power’s emails is an effort to turn a burgeoning Russia scandal against Trump during her final days in office.

For example, when a reporter emailed that he was working on a story advancing the Trump-Russia collusion theory, she asked Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, to assist. “Sounds serious. Can you follow up, Ben?” she emailed."...........

"Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, told me that the emails’ expressed bias and the use of government speeches, interviews and events to counter Trump might warrant an investigation into whether any conduct violated the Hatch Act’s prohibition on engaging in political activities on government time.

But the most important impact of the emails may lie in the ongoing investigation into the Obama administration’s unmasking of American names in secret foreign intelligence reports.

Congressional investigators confirmed more than two years ago that there was a massive spike between 2014 and 2016 in the number of names Obama officials asked be unmasked, including dozens involving Trump campaign and transition officials."

"Though Power’s U.N. job did not have regular intelligence-gathering responsibilities, her name was invoked as the authority for unmasking hundreds of American names in 2016 — averaging more than one American name per day, the investigation found.

When Power was questioned last summer, she gave congressional investigators an unsettling answer: She claimed that she did not specifically request many of the unmaskings and that other government officials must have used her name as a justification.

Multiple congressional investigations continue to pursue how and why those unmaskings occurred, and whether any led to damaging leaks such as the January 2017 publication of secret intercepts between Russia’s ambassador and then-Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn.".....

...."In her congressional testimony last year, Power did not provide a compelling reason for the hundreds of unmaskings done in her name. And each time a U.S. official unmasks a name, he or she essentially is overruling an intelligence professional’s assessment that there wasn’t a national security reason to violate that American’s privacy."

"While lawmakers in both political parties bicker over unmasking, the practice has ticked up under Trump. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence tells me that in fiscal 2018, unmasked names rose nearly 70 percent to 16,721, compared to 9,529 in 2017.

Bias or no bias, Americans deserve an answer to the question of why privacy-busting unmasking has become so widespread."
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^^^^ When Power was questioned last summer, she gave congressional investigators an unsettling answer: She claimed that she did not specifically request many of the unmaskings and that other government officials must have used her name as a justification. Multiple congressional investigations continue to pursue how and why those unmaskings occurred, and whether any led to damaging leaks such as the January 2017 publication of secret intercepts between Russia’s ambassador and then-Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn.".....

Regardless of what you think of Power, you should read her book, A Problem from Hell : America and the Age of Genocide.

Very unflattering for all of the Democratic presidents, especially Carter and Clinton.

I will warn you, it is a tad "slow" reading, very text bookish