John Solomon article. Includes ODNI Transparency Report which I linked to separately.
Statistical Transparency Report Regarding the Use of National Security Authorities
Calendar Year 2019
Office of Civil Liberties, Privacy, and Transparency April 2020
https://www.dni.gov/files/CLPT/documents/2020_ASTR_for_CY2019_FINAL.pdf
The line between lawful unmasking and political spying — and what comes next
When my colleague Sara Carter and I broke the story in spring 2017 about a three-fold increase in the search of Americans' unmasked phone records during President Obama's second term, the immediate fear was that a limited tool created for intelligence analysts had been become so widespread that political appointees might use it to target political enemies.
The fear was that if US intelligence increasingly searched phone records of Americans collected by the National Security Agency to learn who they talked with overseas and on what days, it would become more tempting to seek to listen to specific intercepted conversations of political adversaries, i.e. spying on the actual conversations after the fact,
Those fears were realized on Wednesday when documents declassified by acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Ric Grenell and made public by two senators showed more than a dozen Obama political appointees sought to unmask more than two dozen intercepted conversations involving then-incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. And that occurred in just the two months between when President Trump won the election and he took office.
Most of the requesters were appointees not career intelligence analysts, and included the likes of Vice President Joe Biden, U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, Obama Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, two ambassadors and a half dozen Treasury Department officials including then-Secretary Jack Lew.
To illustrate the political ties, one of the requesters listed, then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Sarah Raskin, is married to Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, one of Trump's harshest critics in Congress. Fired FBI Director James Comey and ex-CIA Director John Brennan, two more Trump critics, also got in on the unmasking action.
Full article:
https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/line-between-lawful-unmasking-and-political-spying-and