slate - "Trumps War on Leakers Isnt Really About Leakers"

The president cares more about loyalty than threats to national security.

By Leon Neyfakh

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/06/reality_winner_s_arrest_is_not_part_of_trump_s_war_on_leakers.html

One of Donald Trump’s most intense preoccupations since becoming president has been catching leakers who supply journalists with secret information. While Trump was already on the record as advocating for the execution of Edward Snowden, his problem with leaks wasn’t personal before, and it didn’t obsess him like it does now. “We’re going to find the leakers, and they’re going to pay a big price,” the president told reporters in February, after anonymous sources helped break open the story of disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s improper interactions with Russia. It has also been reported—with the help of anonymous sources, of course—that Trump asked now-former FBI Director James Comey to jail journalists who publish classified information.


Given Trump’s stated interest in catching leakers and punishing them, it makes total sense that the arrest of a government contractor for leaking National Security Agency documents to the Intercept would be interpreted as evidence that his war on leakers is now underway. As New York Times national security reporter Adam Goldman wrote on Twitter, “The crackdown on leaks has begun in earnest.” Goldman then added, “This leak arrest has huge implications. Signals Sessions/Rosenstein are going to carry out Trump's marching orders and imprison leakers.”

There’s an obvious logic to this analysis: Trump has made clear to his Justice Department that he wants leakers sniffed out and prosecuted, and now his Justice Department is doing exactly that. But before we ring the alarm and decide we’ve entered a new era—one in which the president stops yelling about leakers and starts trying to put them in prison—it’s worth remembering the actions of the previous administration. It’s also worth remembering what motivates Donald Trump.


First, as USA Today reporter Brad Heath argued on Twitter, it’s almost certain that Barack Obama’s Department of Justice would have sought to prosecute the alleged leaker, 25-year-old Reality Winner, had this occurred during his administration. This is not just because Winner is accused of having done something obviously illegal and made herself incredibly easy to catch. It’s because Obama himself took an infamously severe stance on leakers and whistleblowers. In addition to prosecuting at least six government employees and two contractors under the Espionage Act, Obama pushed for a national security exception to a media shield law aimed at protecting journalists. He also introduced an initiative called the Insider Threat Program that directed government employees to monitor one another, and his Justice Department secretly obtained phone records for Associated Press journalists as part of an investigation into the release of classified information. In 2013, the Committee to Protect Journalists released a report arguing that Obama had waged the most aggressive “war on leaks” of any president since Nixon. According to the report, “Those suspected of discussing with reporters anything that the government has classified as secret are subject to investigation, including lie detector tests and scrutiny of their telephone and email records.”


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