By Marina Demidiuk @Adobe Standard
Information Ooze
With the Trump administration’s military strikes on Yemen’s Houthi pirates a success, now its scandalous planning of those strikes on an insecure app can be lemonade. The leak did not endanger US forces, Holman W. Jenkins notes. It wasn’t the end of the world.
What it could do is enhance influence over a hard-to-control administration. Lemonade.
A Washington Post report was based on “thousands of pages of government records, including sealed court filings and exhibits.” There were interviews with at least “two dozen” people who were knowledgeable about the Justice Department and FBI probe, some of whom referenced “classified U.S. intelligence.”
Kimberley Strassel in the WSJ wonders if readers are struggling to remember the meltdown in Washington over the “leak.” Nor do I. The Post revealed details of the “sordid story,” including “unproven suspicion” that the Egyptian government “illegally” helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election.
Could the permeating bad reek from the anonymously sourced story be the work of a Democratic operation to damage Mr. Trump three months before the election? The leak was embraced, celebrated, and used to pummel Trump during his campaign.
Ms. Strassel brings up the leak in the wake of this week’s Signal fiasco. It is about time, she writes, to talk about this and DC’s decades-long “epidemic of information ooze.”
Democrats and the media certainly want to turn the Signal flap into the shame of 2025.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D., Mass.): “Incompetence so severe that it could have gotten Americans killed.”
From The New York Times: “Democrats Call for [Pete] Hegseth and [Mike] Waltz to Resign.”
Rep. Chris Deluzio (D., Pa.): “This is an outrageous national security breach and heads should roll.”
From The Washington Post: “Attorney General Pam Bondi avoids questions about investigating leak.”
Noteworthy is that Washington is acting alarmed. The blunder happened when Trump officials added a journalist to a Yemen war-planning chat conducted on a publicly available messaging app.
Security concerns aside, the real crime is how junior varsity the episode looks. Aren’t national security officials supposed to conjure up situation rooms and Faraday bags? What do you mean by group chats on unsecured phones? Come on, not possible.
The unintentional “leak” should have been tightly held. Instead, it was sloppily released to journalists. What is rare is that Americans learned who did it and why it happened.
Double Standards vs No Standards
Compare the torrent of leaks that began in the runup to Donald Trump’s first election, continues KS. Almost each was from an unnamed official who planted selected information in credulous media outlets. The purpose was to manipulate politics.
These weren’t folks who accidentally touched the wrong phone button or carelessly handled a document. Nor had they stumbled across actual government abuse or untruths and felt compelled to bring it out.
- Leaks into the Trump-Russia collusion: fact-free “dossier” and FBI investigation into it to sway the 2016 election.
- Leaks about Michael Flynn’s call with a Russian ambassador, to further the “collusion” narrative.
- Dozens more leaks out of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, most as wild as they were false.
- Leaks about Mr. Trump’s confidential phone calls with foreign leaders, to cast him as chaotic, a dolt, dangerous.
- Leaks about Jared Kushner’s path to a top-secret security clearance, to try smearing him as captive to foreign influence.
- Later, after Mr. Biden was in the White House, leaks of a Supreme Court draft opinion.
Dirty Work
Whatever the motivation behind leaks, each one causes harm to national security.
… leakers, who give their information to the world, cause more damage than even spies, who pass info to a single foreign government. Foreign allies grew wary of speaking candidly to the Trump White House or sharing intelligence.
Leaky Double Standards
Americans pay a huge cost for the required investigations: special-counsel investigations, congressional hearings, resignations, and endless drama. Democrats and the media doggedly insist, KS reminds readers, on feting those leakers as patriots, heroes, truth-tellers.
It is time to celebrate. Finally, leaks are a problem for the left and for the media.
