Former United Nations ambassador Samantha Power is denying, emphatically, to Congress, that she ever requested 260 unmaskings of Americans caught up in intelligence surveillance dragnets during President Obama's last year in office.  She says someone else did it.

The Daily Caller reports:

Someone within the Obama administration's intelligence apparatus made requests to unmask the identity of Americans named in intelligence reports on behalf of Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

That's what Power told the House Intelligence Committee last week during a closed-door interview.

South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy revealed in an interview on Fox News on Tuesday that Power was "emphatic" on the point that someone else in the Obama administration made the unmasking requests that have been attributed to her.

Fox News recently reported that Power made approximately 260 unmasking requests – a rate of one per business day – in her final year in office, including up through the end of Obama's term.

Many of these unmaskings, which are supposed to be done only under extraordinary circumstances, were of people affiliated with then-candidate President Trump.  After the unmaskings were done, the information was leaked to the press.  No one has been caught or punished for these illegal acts, which would have put an ordinary soldier, sailor, or spy in prison.  This is why Rep. Trey Gowdy and others in Congress are trying to get to the bottom of the matter.

Could Power really be making excuses?  Claiming that the dog ate her homework?  Trying to get out from the consequences of totalitarian state acts on unwitting Americans?  Trying to make the issue go away as unresolvable?

Maybe.

But there's also the chance she is telling the truth.

As I wrote back in September:

It's baffling stuff, because it was so unprecedented.  To request the unmasking of an American  is supposed to be done only in exceptional circumstances, given the potential for Stasi-like abuse of power.  Power made it her daily preoccupation even as she was supposed to be doing her United Nations job.

That raises questions of what it was for.  Apparently, it was the Trump campaign she was spying on.  Yet she never came off as a typical slimy political operative such as was commonly seen hanging around the Obama administration.  Sure, she was a troglodyte lefty, but she never came off as a campaign expert.

We have yet to see any outrage from Power that someone might have been using her security access for these illegal unmaskings.  Perhaps it's there, and it's just not been reported.  What's more, we have yet to see any desire by Power to get to the bottom of it, even though it's her name all over the problem.  All we know is that she wants to get out of it.  It seems natural that she would want the real culprit who stole her name and password, and put her in the congressional dock (and maybe a real one later on), to be found.  It seems natural that she might have a few ideas about how this came about.  But thus far, there is no news to that effect.

Could she be protecting someone – say, President Obama, or one of his creepier ideological associates, such as Valerie Jarrett or Ben Rhodes?  Did she give them her identification and password?  If so, she should be held responsible for that.

The other possibility is that she's issuing a warning, saying she doesn't mean to be the fall guy for this Stasi-like act, as someone who's staked her professional reputation on being a sanctimonious human rights campaigner.  If so, it would be more admirable, given that she would be much more likely to be helpful in identifying the real culprit.

Because not only were these maskings an illegal free-for-all for the Obamatons, redolent of every other socialist regime that spies on its own people, but they also were an unaccountable free-for-all, with someone using someone else's name to avoid responsibility and getting away with it.  That's not how real democracies are run; it's how banana republics are run and totalitarian socialist regimes.

Let's look for a sign as to what Samantha Power's real loyalties are – to the rule of law or to Obama's political machine.