In the post about Grenell’s satchel on Wednesday, we looked at the importance of understanding that the information Richard Grenell has amassed is mostly about all the other “unmaskings” that were being done by the Obama administration.  Those are the unmaskings that tell investigator John Durham what the scope of the Obamagate enterprise was, and who was in on it.

In this article, I want to move on and give a flavor of what we can discern from the list already released by Senators Grassley and Johnson.  This is the list with the big marquee names in it: Biden, Clapper, Brennan, Power, and so forth.

Sharp-eyed analysts have already pointed out that Samantha Power appears to have testified untruthfully to Congress about whether she unmasked Flynn or another Trump team associate.  She said she didn’t.  But in this list alone, she’s recorded as unmasking Michael Flynn seven times.

I suspect it was actually someone who worked for her and was able to deploy her credentials who did that.  It may well be that Power was unaware of the hundreds of unmaskings from 2016 and January 2017 that have her name on them.

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But the more significant point is that we can learn a lot from looking at the list posted by Grassley and Johnson.  We learn more from it than seems possible at first, if we know how to interpret it.

Why spy

Here’s the key to that.  The formal unmaskings of Flynn – which is all we’re looking at here – were done because of what was going on at the time in world events and U.S. policy.  There are probably a few that represent merely a nosy desire to find out what Flynn was communicating with someone about.  But most of the unmasking events were tied to developments in U.S. foreign policy and national security.

The motive was to discover what the Trump transition team was saying to others about those developments.