AP Images Fourth Estate Dear Baby Donald: Leaks Are as American as Apple Pie Stop whining about the leakers, Mr. President, and get your own house in order.

Trump is making journalism great again! He’s making me great again! Send leaks to [email protected]. My email alerts have dirt to leak on my Twitter feed and my Twitter feed has dirt to leak on my RSS feed, which is nothing but dirt.

Will somebody please introduce Donald Trump the candidate to Donald Trump the president?

Such was his enthusiasm for unauthorized, unlawful leaks last summer that while on the hustings, he made mighty bales of hay over the hacked Democratic National Committee emails, even going so far as to urge Russia’s hackers to release Hillary Clinton’s “missing” emails if they had them. In the fall, he gloried in WikiLeaks’ sluicing of John Podesta’s emails into the public domain, using them to score political points against Clinton. The Trump camp, said Podesta, had advance knowledge of the hack.


On Wednesday morning, Trump’s tongue-clucking supplanted his previous cheerleading of leaks. In a pair of seminal tweets, he first bawled that “Information is being illegally given to the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost by the intelligence community (NSA and FBI?). Just like Russia.” A few hours later he reiterated that position, stating that “classified information [being] illegally given out by ‘intelligence’ like candy. Very un-American!”

Un-American? Why, there is nothing more All-American than a leak! The Pentagon Papers, for example, which revealed the inner machinations of U.S. war policy and were published by the New York Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere. The Iran-Contra revelations. The diplomatic and military documents liberated by Chelsea Manning and disseminated by WikiLeaks. The Snowden cache. The Panama Papers leaks and the day-by-day leaking of classified and confidential information upon which the foundation of Page One journalism rests.

To a one, these leaks helped citizens and officeholders learn what powers were being flexed behind the scenes in their names but without their sanction. Now that he’s president and not a mere campaigner, Trump has taken the convenient position that leaks are dangerous and illegal things and that secrets should be kept secret in the name of national security. But as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted long ago, excessive secrecy harms national security by blocking policymakers from the information that aids informed decision-making. For example, the U.S. Army and FBI denied President Harry Truman access to the “Venona decryptions”—the intercepts that documented Soviet espionage in the United States, because they deemed his White House too leaky!

The leaks that have just exposed the lies of former national security adviser Michael Flynn have done the nation—and Vice President Mike Pence—a great mitzvah by unmasking his subterfuges. Flynn, you’ll recall, lied to Pence’s face about his pre-inauguration contacts with the Russians, and Pence carried those lies onto TV, where he shared them in January. It wasn’t until he read a Washington Post report about Flynn’s lies that he began his inquiries and learned what other White House officials had learned a couple of weeks earlier. Thus did Pence avoid becoming his generation’s Truman.

Elements of the conservative media (Daily Beacon and Daily Caller, for example) have attempted to sketch the Flynn leaks as a counterintelligence operation by the “Deep State” and former Obama officials to undermine the Trump presidency, a theory the president himself appears to endorse in his tweets. Without a doubt, the sharp knives of the existing and exiled bureaucracy can hobble and gimp the incoming administrations they oppose. It’s called obstruction, and both parties play the game, denying the Flynn leaks any status as exceptional.

Information is power, which is why bureaucracies hoard and declare it secret. Leaks, as the history books, memoirs and newspaper archives show us, are one of the most important ways government bureaucracies inform government bureaucracies what the government bureaucracies are doing. Only somebody who lived on an island of naiveté would ever move into the White House and think the Deep State won’t leak against him. Likewise, every president dispenses privileged information to the press and political allies to assist in his policymaking. Once—and if—he gets his bearings, President Trump will help himself to these behaviors. This is leaking, too, and it’s All-American, too.

The motives behind the Flynn leaks deserve our scrutiny. Did the intelligence officials who collected Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador and then, as has been hypothesized, leak them do so to undermine the president and boost their own stock? Possibly, and worthy of a Page One story. Did FBI investigators tell the press about Flynn’s lies for similar self-aggrandizing reasons? Again, I’d both assign and read that story. But I’m less shocked about bureaucracies leaking truthful and civically valuable information about a powerful and dangerous liar in government than I am in learning they aren’t robots who are slaves to a key that Baby Donald sticks into their back and winds them up with.

Long ago, media scholar Stephen Hess built out a taxonomy of leaks that should guide our thinking in reading the news. (Warning, I’m cribbing myself here.) Leakers leak for a reason, and not always to preserve the Constitution. Deep Throat—aka Mark Felt—leaked because he thought he was unjustly being passed over for the directorship of the FBI and wanted to injure President Richard Nixon, an “Animus Leak” in the Hess parlance. Leakers leak to boost their own egos; they leak as goodwill deposits with a reporter, hoping they can make a withdrawal later. They leak to advance their policy initiative to destroy a rival’s policy initiative or to gauge public reaction to an idea or to blow the whistle on wrongdoing.

If Trump hopes to tame the leak monster—something no other leak-hating president has ever done—he might want to stop lying first so as not to antagonize the leakers. But you know how likely that is.