In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen takes current and former administration officials to task for leaking sensitive information to news outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. Leaks to the papers seem to have revealed far more information about operations to gather intelligence on ISIS than the president has.
Current and former officials leaking sensitive information to the media to damage the president and the administration must be stopped. It’s one thing to be angry the president released sensitive information, it’s another thing altogether to leak even more information in an effort to hurt his presidency.
One problem with that: Trump did not reveal to anyone that Israel was the source of the intelligence he shared with the Russians. So how did the New York Times, which broke the news of Israel’s role, find out? According to the Times, its sources were “a current and a former American official familiar with how the United States obtained the information” who “spoke on the condition of anonymity” because they “were not authorized to discuss the matter.” NBC News, meanwhile, reported that it had confirmed the Israeli role “with three government officials with knowledge of the matter.”
Ponder the irony: These geniuses were so appalled by Trump sharing sensitive intelligence with the Russians that they shared even more sensitive intelligence with the media — and thus the entire world — in order to demonstrate that Trump cannot be trusted with sensitive intelligence. In so doing, these leakers possibly did far more damage to U.S. national security — and intelligence-sharing between the United States and Israel — than anything Trump may have revealed to the Russians.
Don’t take my word for it. That is the assessment of John Brennan, Barack Obama’s CIA director, who said last week that “the real damage to national security is . . . what was leaked in the aftermath, what was put in the media” adding that “these individuals who still stay within the government and are leaking this stuff to the press need to be brought to task.”
Amen.
Read more here.
