Even some Democrats have been critical of the recent leaks of transcripts of talks between President Trump and various foreign leaders, stating national security concerns.

Not enough Democrats have condemned it, in my book. But that there are any at all shows how far the WaPo went, and how perniciously the paper ignored the security implications for us all.

As for the question of who might have leaked the transcripts, we have this:

The notes were likely taken by a National Security Council official, who then put the conversations into a memorandum of conversation which is then sent through an editing and approval process by senior officials on the NSC.

The memorandum is then logged and registered as the official U.S. record of the meeting and kept on file either at the NSC or State Department.

It can be distributed, sometimes as a hard copy, to relevant officials at the Department of State, Department of Defense, CIA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and other agencies within the intelligence community.

Those with appropriate clearances can also view the memorandums at the repositories where they’re kept. Along the way, there are scores of opportunities for the classified documents to “jump the gap.”

Seems that there’s a tremendous amount of vulnerability there. It also makes it more surprising that such leaks haven’t happened far more often—when a Republican is president, of course. And yet I can’t recall this sort of leak ever occurring before.

Oh, and naturally some news commentators have floated the idea that the leaker was the Trump White House itself. The motive? To make the press look bad.