Samantha Power is an individual who gives rise to a strange sort of nostalgia: "Remember when the U.S. was represented at the United Nations by the Witch of the Moors?"

Power has reappeared from obscurity this week amid questions concerning "unmasking" activities during the 2016 election. Like most members of the Obama administration, Power left behind her a trail of mysteries, of events that are utterly incomprehensible unless they're part of a larger scheme still unknown to us. In her case, these involved the illegal "unmasking" of American citizens.

Unmasking is the process by which American names picked up in the course of foreign intelligence operations that are normally redacted are revealed to the officials requesting the procedure. It's easy to see the problem here: Americans who simply happened to be in the same room as a foreign intelligence target can be misidentified as involved in some foreign operation, and from there can be threatened, embarrassed, or leaked against. Michael Flynn and Jeff Sessions can tell you all about this.

It seems that the Irish beldam requested a large amount of these — a full 260 — in the midst of an election season. This, in light of all the other events involving Obama alumni during that busy 2016 season, has caused a number of Washington antennae to twitch.

This week, Power was asked in public for the first time about the matter. Her response was to the point: "It's false," she said.

This differs from her testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, where she admitted to the unmaskings but insisted that she hadn't ordered them. It was somebody else using her name.

So that's clear — she left her unmasking keys atop her desk at the U.N., and somebody snuck in and used them.

Like much that went on under the Chicago Messiah, we'll probably never get to the bottom of this. But, along with Joe Biden's Ukraine woes, it's yet another reminder that every last member of the "most scandal-free administration in history" was corrupt to the bone.