William Yeomans, a former deputy assistant attorney general who spent 26 years at the Justice Department, said “there is no indication the op-ed writer broke the law, particularly since no classified information was revealed.” He called Trump’s request “extraordinary and frightening.” “The Department of Justice investigates crimes and conducts counterintelligence investigations,” he said. “A criminal investigation cannot be launched without a predicate suggesting a reasonable basis to believe that criminal conduct may have occurred.” There is also no evidence, Yeomans argued, that the op-ed posed a “legitimate threat” to national security. “Without some indication that the national security may be jeopardized, DOJ cannot—and must not—initiate a counterintelligence investigation.”

A case could be made that the op-ed makes the U.S. look leaderless on the international stage. But that would not exactly be a new revelation, said John McLaughlin, a former acting director of the CIA. “I fear the U.S. already looks that way,” he said. “At minimum, the international audience is confused—about whether to believe the president, or his major advisors, because what they say and do is often at odds.” As far as launching a criminal investigation over the op-ed, McLaughlin, like Laufman and Yeomans, saw no legal basis for it. “My experience at CIA is that the director can file a ‘crimes report’ with DOJ only if someone has leaked classified information or committed a felony,” McLaughlin said. “There is no classified information here and no felony. This is instead a problem of discipline and management in the White House and therefore something for which the President needs to look in the mirror in my view.”

David Kris, a former Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s National Security Division and a founder of Culper Partners, acknowledged that the op-ed “may very well be bad for America, and make the country look bad. But let’s be clear on what the root cause of all these difficulties is: the president’s own conduct. So even if the responses it provokes are unappealing and inappropriate—which I think the op-ed is—we ought not lose sight of what is the primary problem we are faced with.”

John A. Rizzo, a former acting general counsel at the CIA, also said that a criminal investigation was misguided. “Being insubordinate and untrustworthy as a government employee can and has been the basis for termination, especially if you’re in a national-security agency, and I think that would be an appropriate sanction if this person is ever identified,” Rizzo said. “But that is a matter for the security folks at the White House and their counterparts elsewhere in the bureaucracy to look into. So this should deserve an administrative investigation, not a criminal one.” Indeed, said Kris, Trump’s request to Sessions betrays “an attitude of, ‘L’état, c’est moi.’ It reflects a failure to distinguish between his own personal feelings and interests on the one hand, and the interests of the United States on the other.”