The Leak of the NSA Intercept

Congress retroactively legalized the Bushshiny spying program to make it legal for the NSA to spy on your calls without a warrant as long as you're talking to a foreign citizen. The way we ended up learning about Michael Flynn's conversation with the Russian ambassador is because somebody inside the US government leaked the transcript of the NSA intercept to Washington Post's David Ignatius who was first in early 2017 to report that Michael Flynn had called the Russian ambassador and talked about sanctions. This is one of the few areas leaking NSA intercepts where it's a crime a felony not only to leak it from inside the government but also to publish it.