On Fox & Friends, Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano claimed that then-President-elect Donald Trump was unmasked by the Obama administration. Napolitano said that a rule change signed off on by former Attorney General Loretta Lynch “probably triggered the unmasking of then-President-elect Trump and Gen. [Michael] Flynn.”
As NBC News has noted, “there is no evidence” that anyone on Trump’s team was improperly unmasked, and such requests are “routine” for national security officials. Nonetheless, Napolitano and others in pro-Trump media have claimed that the Obama administration improperly unmasked members of the Trump campaign, and Napolitano has called this alleged unmasking of Trump associates for political purposes “the most serious threat to personal liberty …since the Civil War.” Napolitano is a noted conspiracy theorist who has claimed without evidence that a recently-arrested former congressional information technology (IT) staffer was “selling [information] to foreign nationals and foreign intelligence services,” suggested that the government lied about the cause of the September 11 attacks, claimed that the Obama administration surveilled the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and started an international incident by suggesting that Obama had British intelligence spy on Trump Tower.
From the August 1 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends: