President Donald Trump is flaming the intelligence community on Twitter again. "The spotlight has finally been put on the low-life leakers!" he declared Thursday. "They will be caught!"

He could be picking the wrong fight.

The journalist perhaps furthest out front on this story is John R. Schindler, the national-security columnist for the New York Observer and a former intelligence analyst at the National Security Agency. (Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, owns the Observer but stepped down as publisher in January and is in the process of selling the newspaper.)

Schindler was the first to report that the NSA, which focuses on cryptology and related work, "was withholding highly sensitive intelligence from the White House, fearing that it might be compromised by members of Team Trump who possess unsettling links to Moscow." The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday reported the same thing, writing that it "undercores the deep mistrust that has developed between the intelligence community and the president over his team's contacts with the Russian government, as well as the enmity he has shown toward U.S. spy agencies."

Schindler now says that some members of the intelligence community (which he shortens to "IC" in tweets) believe the president must be brought down.

IC thinks Trump is a traitor. I'll leave to actual lawyers to assess that, but it's quite a day in any democracy when the spies think such. — John Schindler (@20committee) February 16, 2017

Now we go nuclear. IC war going to new levels. Just got an EM fm senior IC friend, it began: "He will die in jail."https://t.co/e6FxCclVqT — John Schindler (@20committee) February 15, 2017

Schindler, who resigned as a Naval War College professor in 2014 after a racy selfie of him appeared online, makes clear where his sympathies lie. He argues that the intelligence community is not partisan, that America's spooks are true patriots trying to look out for the country's safety. "U.S. intelligence is not the problem here," he wrote. "The President's collusion with Russian intelligence is. Many details, but the essence is simple."

The growing scandal that some are calling "KremlinGate" exploded into the open this week with retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn's resignation as national security adviser after leaks revealed details about his highly unusual December phone calls with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. The New York Times then reported that Trump's "2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election." Republicans as well as Democrats in the Senate are calling for an investigation. Trump has repeatedly denied there were any contacts between his campaign and Russian intelligence.

The question pundits and Democrats are raising about Flynn's contacts with Russia is the same one that faced President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal four decades ago: What did the president know and when did he know it? Schindler seems to believe that Flynn is a fall guy for Trump and that many more damaging revelations are to come. He wrote:

"[W]hile Flynn is unquestionably a loose cannon, as a career military man he understands the chain of command with perfect clarity."

-- Douglas Perry