Barr appoints Texas prosecutor to review Obama officials’ ‘unmasking’ requests

Attorney General William P. Barr has appointed a U.S. attorney in Texas to scrutinize Obama-era officials who sought to identify anonymized names in government documents that turned out to be people connected to then-President-elect Trump, a Justice Department official said Wednesday.

In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said the attorney general had tasked John Bash, the U.S. attorney in the Western District of Texas, to examine the practice of “unmasking,” which many Republicans charge was abused by the previous administration to unfairly target people close to Trump.

“The attorney general determined that certain aspects of unmasking needed to be reviewed,” Kupec said. “We know that unmasking inherently isn’t wrong, but . . . can be problematic.” Continue reading.