I wrote a post recently about how the plan for leaks and “whistleblowers” to undermine, sabotage, and perhaps impeach Trump was hatched before he even was inaugurated.
But it may come as no surprise that this was not a new approach by the left. In fact, I wrote an older post in April, 2006 about the phenomenon as it was used against President George W. Bush during his term. Some excerpts [emphasis mine]:
Fast forward to now. National security officers presently are encouraged to spill information with which they disagree–and are provided with support groups, networking, and free legal advice–organized by none other than Daniel Ellsberg himself…
As I wrote previously, it appears that national security whistleblowers are being encouraged to act as virtual moles within their own organizations, remaining in their jobs in order to gain more of the sensitive material and to reveal it as they see fit, according to the dictates of their individual consciences, and often for political reasons. And the idea that there will be any serious legal consequences for the whistleblowers has been weakened; Ellsberg expected to be charged with treason (and was), but many whistleblowers today seem to consider such possibilities to be idle threats.
I believe that, as in so many things, the pendulum has swung too far in one direction. We would not want go back to the era when something of the scope of a My Lai could be successfully covered up. The exposure of My Lai was a shock, but one of the benefits is that My Lai has been studied in depth and used as teaching tool by the military, which has instituted reforms that make such an event far less likely to ever happen today.
But it hardly seems necessary–or productive–to allow national security employees to leak like sieves to the press, much of the time about matters that are not clearly illegal, and motivated sometimes by pure partisanship. And it hardly seems good to allow the press to be the final arbiter of whether their own disclosures will damage national security or not.
At the time I wrote that in 2006, Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame was a big mover in the drive to organize in that way. He’s eighty-eight now, and may not be involved anymore, but I have virtually no doubt that the movement goes on with newer leadership and fueled by self-righteous rage against Trump.
Ellsberg’s group was called “The Truth-Teller Organization.” It’s gone now; the links I had for it give you a 404, and there don’t seem to be new ones. A few remnants remain, such as this, but my guess is that whatever group has replaced it has become far more clandestine.
Note that the approach was already full-blown against Bush, so it is an error to think that this is a reaction to Trump – although the reaction is stronger to Trump because he is doing much more to go against the wishes of the intelligence community and the left than Bush ever dreamed of.
In this post from April of 2006 I also wrote about Ellsberg’s own history and how his leak of the Pentagon Papers was handled at the time. Contrast this to now [emphasis mine]:
Ellsberg hoped that the publication of the Papers would cause people to become upset on learning they had been lied to by their government, and then to clamor for the war to end. As such, his position was essentially political–although it was not narrowly partisan, since the Pentagon Papers was an equal-opportunity disclosure; the information obtained therein implicated both Democrat and Republican administrations.
Like Ridenhour, at the outset Ellsburg did not release the documents to the press, but sought instead to persuade certain sympathetic antiwar Senators (chief among them J. William Fulbright) to go public with them on the Senate floor. His motivation for this scheme was that he knew he would be liable to prosecution if he went to the press, and he fully expected to be sent to prison as a result, whereas Senators would be immune from such prosecution.
But no Senator would take the bait, not even Fulbright. As a result, Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the media. Initially, he made an effort to escape prosecution by hiding out…
However, Ellsberg surrendered voluntarily to authorities only a few weeks later:
“On June 28, Ellsberg publicly surrendered to the US Attorney’s Office in Boston, Massachusetts. He was taken into custody believing he would spend the rest of his life in prison; he was charged with theft, conspiracy, and espionage.”
But Ellsberg never went to prison. In a stunningly ironic turn of events, the actions of Nixon’s “plumbers” (who later carried out the Watergate burglary, but whose nickname came from their earlier attempts to fix Ellsberg’s “leaks”) ended up inadvertently freeing Ellsberg. As in a Shakespearean tragedy, Nixon’s wild overreaching against Ellsberg sowed the seeds of Nixon’s own downfall, through the mechanism of those very same plumbers:
“In one of Nixon’s actions against Ellsberg, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in September 1971, hoping to find information they could use to discredit him. The revelation of the break-in became part of the Watergate scandal. ..Because of the gross governmental misconduct, all charges against Ellsberg were eventually dropped.”
…[T]he above quote describes what a watershed event the publication of the Papers was. Before then, newspapers would have been reluctant to print such things–whether out of loyalty to the government or out of fear of repercussions, or both. After the 1971 [SCOTUS case allowing the publication of the Papers], the gloves were off.
Now take a look at yesterday’s piece by Daniel Greenfield entitled “Impeachment is Built on a Trap That Obama Created for Romney: A weapon against a Romney administration gets used against Trump.” In it Greenfield writes [emphasis mine]:
In the Trump era, whistleblowing and partisan leaks to the media have been conflated by the media. Partisan government workers, some openly aligning with the “resistance” and participating in partisan groups within government agencies, have sought to undermine administration policies through leaks. These leaks were in turn meant to generate congressional investigations of cabinet officials.
The impeachment effort against President Trump takes that ongoing tactic to the ultimate extreme.
The politicization of the civil service is a deeply troubling phenomenon. Efforts by members of the civil service to undermine elected officials is a threat to our entire system of representative government.
This problem goes beyond the ‘Deep State’ and has shown up in a wide variety of government agencies. But its appearance in national security agencies is deeply troubling because these agencies have the infrastructure to act as a police state. The existence of national security agencies in a free country is contingent on their subservience to elected officials. Anything else isn’t whistleblowing, it’s a coup.
Obama’s Presidential Policy Directive 19 opened the door by expanding whistleblowing protection to members of the “intelligence community” and other personnel handling classified information.
A few years earlier, Bradley Manning had ushered in a new era of espionage by enemy state actors using front groups to solicit spies as whistleblowers. While the court threw the book at Manning, Obama commuted his sentence. PPD19 was supposed to avoid another Manning case, which it utterly failed to do when Edward Snowden repeated Manning’s treason on a larger scale before escaping to Russia.
But PPD19 was never really meant to help the likes of Manning and Snowden. Instead it was part of a larger pattern of politicizing national security organizations that led directly to the current crisis.
Greenfield points out that at the time PPD19 was issued, Romney was doing well in the polls, and Obama must have been concerned that Romney was poised to win. So he put in place an insurance policy to be unleashed against Romney in the event that he became president.
Those who believe that the current push of the left against Trump is mainly about Trump himself would do well to ponder this history. The left is neither stupid nor lazy, and they have been working hard at this for a long long time.
