Trey Gowdy: Samantha Power claims others unmasked in her name

Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power testified that the hundreds of unmasking requests made in her name, were made by other people. This was discovered by House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and revealed in an interview with Fox News' Bret Baier on "Special Report with Bret Baier,"

"Her testimony is they may be under my name, but I did not make those requests," Gowdy said of Power. She is one among those in the Obama administration who made requests to identify Americans whose names surfaced in foreign intelligence reports, known as unmasking.

 It was reported by Fox News last month that Power was unmasking at an incredibly rapid pace in the final months of Obama's leftist presidency. She averaged over one request for every working day last year and even went so far as to seek information in the days leading to Trump's inauguration.

Gowdy told Bret Baier, "I think if she were on your show, she would say those requests to unmask may have been attributed to her, but they greatly exceed by an exponential factor the requests she actually made. So, that's her testimony, and she was pretty emphatic about it."

Then he added, "So we've go to get to the bottom of that. If there is someone else making requests on behalf of a principal in the intelligence community, we need to know that because we're getting ready to reauthorize a program that's really important to the country, but also has a masking component to it."

Power was interviewed Friday for a closed-door session with House Intelligence Committee investigators looking into the 'unmasking' of Trump associates under the Obama crowd.

So who's to blame for allowing someone else to use her name to violate the rights to privacy of U.S. citizens? And if it was done with such frequency, why wasn't Powers directly questioned by the judicial authority that grants such requests?


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