.⁦ @emptywheel⁩ has this exactly right.

There are a few key points related to this “unmasking” list:

(1) This almost certainly has little or nothing to do with the Flynn-Kislyak call. https://www.emptywheel.net/2020/05/13/of-over-40-potential-unmaskings-of-mike-flynn-during-the-transition-just-one-led-to-criminal-charges/

(2) We know this first because the vast majority of these unmasking requests take place in mid-December, before the Flynn-Kislyak calls had even taken place.

(3) We also know this because the Flynn-Kislyak transcript came from the FBI’s holdings, not NSA’s, and this list includes people only who asked NSA to unmask someone who turned out to be Flynn.

(4) This clearly suggests there was a finished NSA product in mid-December 2016 that alarmed a bunch of people, who turned around and requested the unmasking of a US person flagged in the reporting (ie Flynn). Given the prevalence of NATO people on the list...

...it strikes me as likely this was some kind of counterterrorism or Mideast issue, but that’s just a guess.

(5) We also know that whatever it was, it did not materially impact the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of Flynn, because by late December, the FBI was getting ready to shut that down (a plan aborted when the Flynn-Kislyak conversations were discovered in FBI’s...

—not NSA’s—holdings.

(6) This strongly suggest, as Marcy suggests, that the reporting at issue here, was NOT Russia-related.

(7) As Marcy also notes, the FBI did not incorporate the Flynn-Kislyak calls into analytic work product. I believe, but I’m not certain, that it simply distributed a transcript of the call to a few key relevant decision-makers. That transcript did not have Flynn masked.

(An aside: “masked” is actually an NSA term. In FBI parlance, the term would be “minimized.) The reason is that his identity would be essential to understanding the intelligence being reported. So there would have been no unmasking to do.

(8) So what are the few unmasking requests from the period in early January in which the FBI was discovering the Kislyak conversations? Two possibilities: the first is that they are coincidental—people reading late the December NSA reporting and acting just as others had earlier.

The second is that people after learning of the Kislyak call went back and remembered stuff they had read earlier.

(9) In any event, what is clear is that at least the vast majority of this list has nothing to do with the Flynn-Kislyak call and very likely has nothing to do with Russia at all.

(10) To me the list raises a different question: what did NSA report about Flynn in mid-December that raised so many eyebrows around the government?

That’s all I got.