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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pocotrader who wrote (1231258)	5/19/2020 3:03:19 PM
From: pocotrader	Respond to of 1576376

AP FACT CHECK: Trump, GOP falsehoods on Flynn, Biden, virus By HOPE YEN, ERIC TUCKER and MATTHEW PERRONE WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and his GOP allies are misrepresenting the facts behind the legal case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn as they seek to allege improper behavior during the Obama administration in the presidential campaign season. Broadly dubbing his allegations “Obamagate,” Trump points to unspecified conspiracies against himself in 2016 and suggests the disclosure of Flynn’s name as part of legal U.S. surveillance of foreign targets was criminal and motivated by partisan politics. There’s no evidence of that. In fact, the so-called unmasking of Americans’ names like Flynn’s is legal. Over the weekend, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro also alleged without evidence corruption involving Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, in China. And in an interview re-aired Sunday, Trump mischaracterized messages between FBI employees to suggest a post-2016 election plot to get him. Meanwhile, Trump continued to spread falsehoods about the availability of tests needed to help stem the spread of the coronavirus in the U.S. and exaggerated the scope of his travel restrictions on China. A look at the recent political rhetoric and reality: FLYNN TRUMP: “OBAMAGATE!” — tweet Saturday. TRUMP: “Biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the USA.” — tweet Thursday. THE FACTS: He’s making an unsupported claim that former President Barack Obama broke the law. Trump and his supporters have made the unmasking of Flynn one of their major talking points, claiming that it proves the Obama administration unfairly and illegally targeted Flynn and other Trump associates. But there is nothing illegal about unmasking. The declassified document also states that the unmasking requests were approved through the National Security Agency’s “standard process.” This past week, when Trump was asked by reporters to define Obama’s criminal offense in the alleged “Obamagate,” Trump failed to articulate one. “You know what the crime is,” he said last Monday. “The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.” During routine surveillance of foreign targets, names of Americans occasionally come up in conversation, either because the foreigner is talking to or about them. For privacy reasons, those names are generally concealed, or masked, before the intelligence is distributed to administration officials. U.S. officials can ask the agency that collected the intelligence to unmask the name if they think it is vital to understanding the intelligence. While Trump casts unmasking as sinister, the number of identities unmasked in response to such requests has actually increased during the first years of the Trump administration from the final year of the Obama administration. ___