The following article by Spencer Ackerman was posted on the Daily Beast website June 7, 2018:
Obama aide Ben Rhodes writes that he learned about Mike Flynn’s parley with the Russian ambassador not from ‘unmasked’ surveillance intercepts but from Trump’s own people.
The Trump transition team told Barack Obama’s White House about Mike Flynn’s fateful conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, according to a senior Obama aide’s new memoir. That account stands in contrast to oft-repeated claims that the Obama team unmasked Flynn’s name after learning of the Kislyak conversation from surveillance intercepts.
Ben Rhodes, an Obama deputy national security adviser and a long-time right-wing bête noire, often features prominently in accusations from Donald Trump’s allies that the outgoing White House improperly “unmasked” Flynn from surveillance intercepts and then leaked his name to discredit him. In October, Rhodes testified behind closed doors to the House intelligence committee probe controlled by Trump ally Devin Nunes about unmasking.
But in his just-released book, The World as It Is, the former senior National Security Council staffer writes that the Obama White House learned about the Flynn-Kislyak talks from the Trump team itself. If Rhodes’ claim is true, then Obama aides had no need to “unmask” any surveillance intercept of Kislyak’s phone calls to determine Flynn was the interlocutor.
Flynn “took a couple of weeks after his own appointment to accept Susan Rice’s invitation to meet,” Rhodes writes. “His own transition team volunteered to us that he’d met with Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, before meeting with the American official he was replacing.”
Rhodes didn’t hear about that firsthand, he clarified, as the Trump transition team didn’t deal with Rhodes. (“You’re kind of PNG,” Rhodes quotes the outgoing Obama team’s transition director telling him, meaning ‘persona non grata,’ someone who is not welcome.) Instead, Rhodes’ White House colleagues informed him of the Trump team’s disclosure of the meetings.
“I never unmasked any Trump campaign official or associate—not a single time. The ‘unmasking scandal’ was a completely craven and disingenuous farce masquerading as outrage.”<
— Ben Rhodes
“This was the first time I heard about Flynn talking to Kislyak,” Rhodes told The Daily Beast. “I never unmasked any Trump campaign official or associate—not a single time. The ‘unmasking scandal’ was a completely craven and disingenuous farce masquerading as outrage, all intended to keep Americans from focusing on the real story of the Trump campaign’s links to Russia.”
Rhodes said the Trump transition did not tell its Obama counterpart what Flynn discussed with Kislyak.