The WaPo: leaking with impunity
I believe I would have the same attitude no matter which president was the subject of leaks such as the ones published in today’s WaPo involving classified conversations between the president and various foreign leaders (particularly Mexico’s President Enrique Peé±a Nieto)—that it’s something that is absolutely not okay, and possibly criminal on the WaPo’s part.
This sort of leak of classified information, with national security implications, has been going on since the Nixon years (remember that Nixon’s famous “Plumbers” got their name because their original goal was to plug the leaks), and the MSM is swollen with its own self-righteousness and self-supposition that it’s immune from prosecution.
It’s not as though the content here revealed some enormous presidential crime of which the American people have a deep need to be informed, either. Judge for yourself.
Even at an anti-Trump conservative site like RedState you can find comments such as this one: “I say the most important thing about this entire story is that we have a transcript of the conversation in the public domain. How the hell can the President conduct business when all his private conversations are leaked?”
Excellent point, and one the WaPo either hasn’t asked, or (more likely) has asked and answered that Trump being unable to conduct business would be a feature, not a bug. And they believe that they, not the American people, are the proper arbiters of that.
I was curious what a neutral pundit might say, particularly a person with a legal background. I found this at Lawfare, a blog which is not Trump-friendly. I don’t know much about the author’s political affiliation, but this is what he wrote in a public note to the leaker, and it certainly indicates no love lost for Trump:
I get it. You don’t like the President. I don’t either, so I understand. But you, whoever you are, are doing as much damage, if not more, to the United States than he ever will. Really.
I assume you think you are doing the world a favor. I assume you have the best intentions. But stop. Just stop leaking. Really.
Though it may be fun to give the Washington Post transcripts of the President’s calls to foreign leaders, you gravely injure America in incalculable ways by doing what you are doing. For one thing, you are embracing norm-destruction in a way that is no less disturbing than the President’s aberrational behavior. And you don’t even have his excuse that you don’t know better — you do. For another, think of how this plays with other governments — will any foreign leader ever again have a candid phone call with any American President? Why should they assume that this type of leaking with [sic] stop if Trump leaves.
I would say there is a reason they would “assume that this type of leaking will stop if Trump leaves,” and it’s because it is motivated by animus towards Trump and towards the right. An interesting question is whether there would be quite as much leaking if the president were a Republican but just not Trump, and my answer is “maybe not quite as much, but there would be plenty and it would be just as damaging to national security.” If the president were a Democrat, the leaks would be few and far between, and they would only involve things that reflect kindly on that president. I also assume that foreign leaders have noticed the differential, and that they would feel more secure for that reason with a Democrat at the helm.
And perhaps the MSM regards that as a feature rather than a bug, as well.
[NOTE: I just want to make it clear that the transcripts leaked were full, which means that all of Nieto’s remarks were made accessible as well as Trump’s.]
[ADDENDUM: David Frum, who can’t stand Trump, also comes out in the Atlantic against the WaPo’s dangerous action.]
[ADDENDUM II: I happen to think that one of the WaPo’s goals is to drive Trump into a frenzy and cause him to erupt and (they hope) to look even more foolish.]
[ADDENDUM III: Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another instance of the transcript of a phone call between a president and a head of state being leaked. Long long after the fact, some transcripts of presidential phone calls have been published, but that’s a different story—and those transcripts don’t include what the person on the other end said.]
ah leaks, spies, etc…
-Anatoliy Golitsyn, New Lies for Old, p. 102
For the leading communists to deny their communist affiliation was a preliminary strategic step in both Washington and Moscow. Freed from the label of what they had actually been, the communists were able to advance without opposition from those annoying anti-communists. And now they are compelled by the logic of their false position to paint the “patriotic American dinosaur” (Donald Trump) as Russia’s puppet. Here the real puppet points to the man and declares that he is the puppet. It is a history-making deception. It is grand and it is bold. It cynically estimates the ignorance of the populace, the corruption of the political class, and the willing treachery of the media.
It relies on the fact that the smartest strategists and analysts on the American side have been sidelined or murdered. So there is nobody to call out the truth.
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not that anyone wants to make up for missing history and such to understand things..
its one thing to gab, gossip and all that noting that the well is poisoned
its another thing to watch as people who say and know that, keep dipping their laddles in to sip and use it.
Of course, you probably think I am crazy. You think communism went away in 1991. You think that communism no longer exists. But then you will have to explain how we got here — with communist thugs using open intimidation on the streets of our cities! If communism lost the Cold War, why does it presently hold such power in government agencies, universities and newspapers? Why do you think U.S. counterintelligence is spying on the President of the United States and his staff? Who wants to bring him down? You need to explain all the variable phenomena of today: from the communist-inspired economic sabotage of global warming “science” to the insistence that our border remain a sieve. It is only our enemies who stand to gain from these policies.
But communism is dead. Nobody believes in it anymore. We are told that the last true believer in communism was Stalin’s protégé and USSR Communist Party Ideology Chief Mikhail Suslov. Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and other top Soviet officials, made a show of abandoning communism. But I tell you it was only a show. Former KGB officer Anatoliy Golitsyn insisted that all communist sources of information are larded with falsehood; that communist officials publicly and privately make misleading statements about themselves, their thoughts and their intentions.
As usual Neo has a great insight into the real issues here. Of course, so does Paul Rosenzweig at Lawfare. (I had never heard of him before.) I say this as one who voted last November, but did not vote for Trump or any of the other candidates for president. Now, I am seeing The Resistance and the MSM as harmful to our national security as they undermine absolutely everything Trump tries to do.
It seems to me that since this is a verbatim transcript, the conversation was recorded and who had control of access to that recording and transcript is known as is who was privy to it.
So the leakers can be found and if they are not, then those ‘investigating’ don’t want to know. Which makes them guilty of obstruction of justice… Sessions needs to put his investigators on notice that they too can be charged.
Lack of consequence encourages lawless behavior.
This has gone on far too long.
Simple solution is to make everyone with access to the transcript or present during the conversation take a polygraph test. Fail the test, have Sessions’ DOJ investigate and bring charges. If all concerned pass the poly there is always waterboarding. 😉 But seriously, the leaks have to stop and heads need to roll…. figuratively. At minimum 10 years in Leavenworth.
Why did they do this? There no collusion with Russia in any of the conversation.
Trump should have several of the WaPo staff arrested for this.
This is as clear a case of Treason, as any in memory.
The sole intent of the leak is to injure the President, through injury to the nation as a whole. This is no different in practice than what the Rosenburgs accomplished.
Trump continues to pay the price for not firing, on January 20th, all of Obama’s appointees and reassigning all those burrowed into the bureaucracy to positions with zero access to classified material. The message needed to be sent on that date, and the longer it isn’t done, the worse it will get.
This is astounding. How could this continue to happen? One answer: The leakers know they will never be caught.
I tend to agree with Mark Levin that the FBI is attempting a coup. They got rid of Nixon, they tried to get rid of Bush, and now they are trying to get rid of Trump.
Not only the leaker but the WaPo have committed a crime:
18 USC Sec. 793
(e)Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it; or . . .
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
First go after the leakers, then WaPo. Solve the main problem, then investigate the ‘journalists’. The boys and girls in the MSM should be easy to turn. None of them can do hard time, and they know it, so walk it up the chain of authority.
Waiting for CNN’s Chris Cuomo to announce only the media can read these as it is illegal for us to and all information about the leaks can only be obtained from them.
The “stop-Trump-at-all-costs” brigade is not going to like what comes next.
To be honest…I don’t think any of us will…but I know those guys won’t.
If Trump starts arresting WAPO editors, Congressional democrats will immediately call for Trump’s impeachment. RINOs like Ryan, McConnell, McCain and Graham may well see this as the opportunity they’ve been waiting for and will ‘regretfully’ declare that he’s gone too far and will vote in the House for Impeachment and will then vote to convict in the Senate.
They want Pence and could care less if the result is a loss of the Presidency in the 2020 election. Being the minority party is after all, the perfect cover for not acting on their promises.
It takes a 2/3 majority to convict and “In Nixon v. United States (1993), the Supreme Court determined that the federal judiciary cannot review such proceedings.”
This despite the WAPO editors being guilty of treason and sedition. In fact, it is all of a piece in the campaign by multiple organizations to remove Trump from office. Congressional democrats, the Deep State, NGOs and the MSM are all working to drive Trump from office.
But Trump’s ouster will correctly be seen by tens of millions to be an overturning of the consent of the governed. It will no longer be arguable that democracy has died in America. IMO there is a high probability that such an outcome will later be declared by historians to have led directly to the second American civil war.
“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot” George Orwell
This is a new low. We’ve seen some horrible damage done to our security and national integrity by leakers in the past. But nothing quite as in your face with obvious intent to bring down the President with malice of forethought. Bush II suffered some major leaks and constant backbiting by the MSM, but this is beyond what we saw then. The state of our nation is marked by division and treachery. Lincoln was right. Our greatest danger lies within.
Disagree with the party in power? Make your case for your ideas in the market place of public opinion. Do not commit treachery and sabotage of the nation to destroy political opponents.
Good comments.
I saw a segment on FoxNews where there were implicit assumptions that this leak came from inside the West Wing. Then some guest came on, and said it could be the NSA. I certainly don’t know, but what if? Has anyone seen any factual clues on where this stuff is coming from?
It really boggles my mind that the First Amendment is apparently interpreted in such a way as to protect media; i.e., the WaPO, when the commit a federal crime.
This has got to stop; and the place to stop it is in the newsroom, editorial board.
We can’t know of course but I imagine it’s coming from multiple sources. I’m doubtful that any electronic conversation is immune from capture by the NSA.
For some useful perspective on leaks, let me recommend parts of Michael Hayden’s book. We lost agents and sources thanks to leaks, which are far more important than this Trump embarrassment.
Of course these transcripts shouldn’t have been leaked, but the damage from the leaks is small.
For instance, I suppose a few Trumpistas actually believed his claim that Mexico would pay for the wall, but almost anyone who thought about it for a few minutes would know that was false — and would be almost certain that Trump knew it, too.
(I suppose I really should do a post or two on the leaks sections
in Hayden’s book. No promises, but I may actually get to them this next week.
The Chicago Tribune/Batttle of Midway story is worth studying, too.)
Oldflyer,
Just another case of the end justifying the means. They’re the good guys, just ask them. No evil can dislodge their halos. After all, once you’re willing to rationalize the murder of 50+ MILLION babies… ethical boundaries cease to have meaning. See they don’t KNOW that prior to birth, its just another ‘body part’ but they want it to be… so, it’s OK.
“I suppose a few Trumpistas actually believed his claim that Mexico would pay for the wall” Jim Miller
One doesn’t have to be a ‘Trumpista’ to realize that with Congressional backing Mexico could easily be made to pay for the wall. The UK’s Daily Mail reports that, “More than $23 billion is sent to Mexico from the U.S. every year.” just tax those transfers and voila, Mexico pays for the wall. Allow anyone sending money to Mexico to get out of the tax, IF they can prove to be a legal immigrant and then only the illegals are paying for the wall.
That Congress will do no such thing is not evidence of lying on Trump’s part but evidence of Congressional disloyalty to the nation’s welfare.
Trump can only state what he wants to do and do what he’s empowered as President to do. It’s up to Congress to facilitate the President’s proposed solutions that the electorate voted to support.
GB: good points all the way around. I long ago concluded that Congress had no intention of revising the terrible immigration “reform” of the 1960s, because they never took any of the easy steps to curtail illegals – one would have been enforcing the laws completely, even if some provisions were problematic; the other would be to reduce foreign aid to Mexico and other countries by the estimated cost of caring for their nationals here.
Yancey Ward Says:
August 3rd, 2017 at 6:24 pm
Trump continues to pay the price for not firing, on January 20th, all of Obama’s appointees and reassigning all those burrowed into the bureaucracy to positions with zero access to classified material. The message needed to be sent on that date, and the longer it isn’t done, the worse it will get.
* *
Indeed.
And then he went and hired MORE people wedded to Obama’s legacy positions.
This isn’t about the leaking per se, but as an expression of the deep collusion directed at derailing the President.
See this by J. E. Dyer:
http://libertyunyielding.com/2017/08/03/nsc-battle-trump-administration/
In evaluating National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster’s seemingly sudden decision to “purge” key Trump hires on the National Security Council, it is essential to go back two days and remember what happened on Tuesday (1 August).
McMaster isn’t doing this for his health, in a contextual vacuum. Nor is there any way to justify seeing the events I will discuss here as unrelated. This week marks the direct, gloves-off engagement of the “Obama-holdovers/deep state” — separate groups that intersect on the NSC — with the Trump administration, in a battle for control of national security policy.
What happened on 1 August? The House Intelligence Committee named Obama NSC aide Ben “Echo Chamber” Rhodes as a person of interest in its probe of “unmaskings” done by Obama officials during the 2016 election cycle.
…
The timeline in March is important, because Cohen-Watnick was identified (by an anonymous source) to the media as the NSC official who enabled Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) to obtain evidence of the unmaskings done by NSC officials during the Obama administration.
Politico’s 14 March report on McMaster and Cohen-Watnick indicates that McMaster informed Cohen-Watnick of the reassignment decision on Friday, 10 March. Trump then stepped in to keep Cohen-Watnick in his job.
It was on 21 March that Devin Nunes went to the White House and gained access to the information he then briefed to the media about potentially improper unmaskings done during the Obama administration.
This tells us that McMaster wanted to remove Cohen-Watnick before Nunes got the ball rolling on the House probe of unmasking activity. (McMaster assumed his job as national security adviser on 20 February.) Why is another question, however, and we should not be too quick to assume it was a mere policy difference.
McMaster then went all the way from 10 March to 2 August honoring Trump’s order to keep Cohen-Watnick in his job. It was only after Ben Rhodes was named as a person of interest in the House probe launched by Nunes — and it was immediately after that announcement — that McMaster chose to fire a silver bullet and defy the president directly.
…
Openly defying the president’s order on Cohen-Watnick is not something to take lightly. Cohen-Watnick’s job put him in a unique position to know a great deal about what was happening in both the intelligence community and on the NSC staff — and he may very well have been the person who helped Nunes view government records on who was unmasking U.S. person identities in the Obama administration.
Removing Cohen-Watnick would be a way of shutting down a channel to the NSC that the president himself both demanded to keep open, and would have relied on. There’s no way around calling this what it is: not a shot across the bow by McMaster, but a broadside volley.
Cohen-Watnick’s prompt firing within hours of Ben Rhodes being named a person of interest looks very much like a combined reaction of the Obama holdovers on the NSC and the “deep state”: the Washington careerists who throw up bureaucratic obstacles and engage in leak campaigns to thwart the policies they don’t like.
GB,
The NSA is the heart of the deep state, along with the rest of the ‘intelligence’ agencies. They answer to no one when push comes to shove.
As much as I would like it, I’m not sure going after WaPo for treason would work.
However, there are several Democratic scandals with plenty of meat on the bones — unlike the Russia story thus far.
Why doesn’t the Trump DOJ go after those Dem scandals hammer and tong?
AesopFan,
You are artflger by another name. Tone it down, or risk being ignored. Just friendly advise.
Excellent point, and one the WaPo either hasn’t asked, or (more likely) has asked and answered that Trump being unable to conduct business would be a feature, not a bug. And they believe that they, not the American people, are the proper arbiters of that.
Talk about norm destruction, the long-term upshot of this is that the American people become indifferent to the untoward things our presidents say in their leaked conversations with other heads of state. After a while, who’s going to care?
However, there are several Democratic scandals with plenty of meat on the bones – unlike the Russia story thus far.
Why doesn’t the Trump DOJ go after those Dem scandals hammer and tong?
They’re just gearing up. Expect to see DWS twisting in the wind before too long here.
Geoffrey Britain You don’t need Congress — withholding on foreign transfers is governed by regulation. One small addition to the regs will do the trick.
Geoffrey Britain — You don’t need Congress — withholding on foreign transfers is governed by regulation. One small addition to the regs will do the trick.
“This is astounding. How could this continue to happen? One answer: The leakers know they will never be caught.”
They WANT to be caught, it will make them famous, as long as they don’t make it look too obvious that they wanted to be caught.
What they “know” is that they will never be punished. If political deterrents are to ever be re-established, this will have to be proven wrong, probably multiple times with increasing harshness.
“You are artflger by another name. Tone it down, or risk being ignored. Just friendly advise.”
Oh please do keep ignoring us. That’s how Trump was elected, after all, and I can’t wait to see what comes next (I’ve got money riding on “President George Zimmerman”).
“Trump continues to pay the price for not firing, on January 20th, all of Obama’s appointees and reassigning all those burrowed into the bureaucracy to positions with zero access to classified material. The message needed to be sent on that date, and the longer it isn’t done, the worse it will get.”
This is a small part of why I argued (obviously to no effect) for Cruz over Trump from midway through the primaries. Trump’s whole campaign, his style, his team were all disorganized, politically incoherent messes. In a year that heavily favored the Anti-Clinton candidate, he nearly lost, but after his surprise victory, it was just more of the same.
He had no clue who on the inside could be trusted; his closest advisers, half of whom were liberal Democrat family members, and the other half, all outsiders of inconsistent ideology, didn’t either, so in many hiring cases, he chose poorly. With a few exceptions, he didn’t know anything about the onslaught of regulations and number of Executive Orders/Memos he would need to rescind.
He didn’t really understand that his election had interrupted what was supposed to be not just the election of the Red Queen, but the solidification of their final victory in the left’s Gramscian march in their (mostly) bloodless revolution on the road to Venezuela. He was not prepared for the depths they would sink to in their Collective Rage to depose him.
In contrast, Cruz is highly organized, knows who the good guys and bad guys are, what needed to done. I believe he would have tasked his staff to have on his desk before Inauguration:
– a list of all 4,000 Obama holdovers and a form resignation letter to them awaiting his signature
– all the Obama Executive Orders/Memos with rescission orders for him to sign
– a study prioritizing the worst of the regulations ordered by cost to the economy
– lists of partially/fully vetted potential judicial and cabinet nominees
– etc, etc, etc.
He would have hit the ground running and shown Trump what winning looked like, a shock and awe campaign that put the Marxists on their heels, wondering what hit them.
Without the circus show too, made easy by the armies of skeletons in his gold plated closets, covered ad nauseum on this site. What would be their lame excuse for trying to have Cruz impeached – that it really was his dad on the grassy knoll, or maybe for his treasonous collusion with our worst enemy…Canada?
In contrast, Cruz is highly organized, knows who the good guys and bad guys are, what needed to done. I believe he would have tasked his staff to have on his desk before Inauguration
That’s an interesting point. Trump’s biggest strength (with the voters) is also his biggest weakness in office (as a politician): he was an outsider. He got elected without any friends in the establishment and now that he’s in office, he has no one he can rely on. And what happens? He’s been appointing people like McMaster who turn around and undermine his agenda by firing the people who were put in place to effect it.
Would it be any different under Cruz? Obama politicized the entire federal bureaucracy as well as the intelligence community, as far as we can tell. Cruz is widely hated by his fellow Republicans, he doesn’t have many more friends in hte GOPe than Trump does, so how many people could he really have relied on? Would these leakers behave any differently toward Cruz than they have to Trump? I doubt it.
More importantly: can we expect our Obamanized bureaucracy to behave this way towards every Republican president from now on? What’s to stop them?
But the media was supposed to hold Trum accountable so that he wouldn’t go full Tyrant…
What people like to rationalize to themselves as they sell their power down the river to DC, during election cycles, us always amusing but inevitably it turns to despair.
In truth, the media is giving Trum a justification, even the perfect Pearl Harbor and Lusitania and Gulf of Tonkin Justification, for going Full Tyrant. Something voters assured me and others, would never happen, because media.
Cruz is widely hated by his fellow Republicans, he doesn’t have many more friends in hte GOPe than Trump does, so how many people could he really have relied on? Would these leakers behave any differently toward Cruz than they have to Trump? I doubt it.
The problem was never in the leaders Americans elect. The problem was that any of you expected them to do something about it.
The moment you gave your power to DC, it became impossible for any single person to fix America. It’s over.
The government of the people for the people is now run by Demons for Demons, with Americans clamoring for an El Presidente to fix all their problems.
Ctrl Left vs Alt Right.
People are being pushed to the extremes, whether they know it or not, and because they are weak humans, they obey the herd impulse and jump on the band wagon.
The band wagon is that train that takes people to Auschwitz.
Cruz was elected by the Tea Party grassroots movement. That is why the establishment didn’t like him.
It is also why Cruz had advanced warning of the Deep State and other shenanigans in DC, because of the IRS persecution of the Tea Party 401/3s.
That doesn’t mean he was going to fix the issue, just meant Cruz had a better idea of who his enemies were than Trum the Demoncrat, did.
There are even leftists and RINOs who are now admitting that Trump has accomplished a lot that has gone unnoticed because this made-up ludicrous Russian crap is sucking up all the oxygen; judicial appointments, regulation rescissions, et al.
Imagine how much more could have been done even by Trump if he didn’t have to fight that fake story 24/7 and he didn’t have liberal family members and ignorant outsiders recommending he hire people now working directly in opposition to his agenda like Tillerson and McMaster. Both of them want to keep the Iran deal in place and McMaster has been busy firing good people that were working to enable Trump’s vision. McMaster even approved that proven liar and unmasker, Susan Rice, should keep her top-secret security status and maintain her full access to literally everything. What the hell is up with that?
Cruz has the same agenda as Trump; I’ve maintained in the past that it’s like he stole it from Cruz. Let’s say that the RINOs and GOPe don’t like Cruz as much as they dislike Trump – so what? That doesn’t have any effect on net since it’s the same for both. (Actually, Cruz gets along well enough with the other conservatives in the Senate and the House, which Trump doesn’t even have going for him.)
So Cruz would have been highly organized, made much better hiring choices; have two or three times as many solid judicial nominees in the pipeline already, the Obama holdovers would have been long gone already and most of Obama’s EOs rescinded already. Finally, what could the media possibly invent about a squeaky clean president that the media could hammer him over 24/7?