The late U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia suspected the Obama administration was spying on him, said Judge Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News senior judicial analyst.
“Justice Scalia told me that he often thought the court was being surveilled. And he told me that probably four or five years ago,” Napolitano told the FOX Business Network on Monday.
Scalia died in his sleep in February 2016 while on a hunting trip at a luxury Texas resort. He was declared dead of natural causes amid speculation of foul play.
Napolitano was discussing allegations U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and another senator were under surveillance by the Obama administration.
“If they had to unmask Senator Paul’s name to reveal a conversation he was having with a foreign agent and the foreign agent was hostile to the United States they can do that,” Napolitano began.
“That’s not what he’s talking about. They’re talking about unmasking him when he’s having a conversation with his campaign manager when he’s running in the Republican primary.”
Unmasking is the revealing of names within the intelligence community of U.S. citizens whose communications were monitored during foreign surveillance.
Napolitano said former President Obama could be subpoenaed to testify if he viewed the unmasked intelligence.
Paul announced May 4 he had asked the intelligence community and White House for any evidence that he was surveilled by Obama.
“I have formally requested from the WH and the Intel Committees info on whether I was surveilled by Obama admin and or the Intel community!” Paul tweeted.
The tweet, the Hill reported, appeared to build off of Trump’s controversial claim that the Obama administration wiretapped Trump Tower during last year’s presidential race.
Spike in unmasking
WND reported an official government report released last month indicated the Obama administration requested the unmasking of almost three times as many Americans under surveillance during the election year of 2016 than during the year before.
The report, “Statistical Transparency Report Regarding Use of National Security Authorities,” contains a chart that shows the identities of 1,934 Americans were unmasked upon requests made by the Obama administration in 2016.
That was nearly triple the number of those unmasked upon request the year before, 654.
The report was prepared under Obama’s director of National intelligence, James Clapper, who served in that position from August 2010 until January 2017.
The report refutes Clapper’s denial to Congress that his agency spied on U.S. citizens. Clapper answered, “No,” when asked, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”
In addition, former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, in a PBS interview March 22, denied any knowledge of the unmasking of associates of candidate and President-elect Trump, collected in foreign surveillance.
Two weeks later, however, she was identified as the Obama administration official who requested the unmasking of incoming Trump administration officials on several occasions.
As WND reported, Rice implicitly acknowledged she was not telling the truth when she did not deny the reports in a subsequent interview with NBC.
