

The constant flow of leaks the media has eagerly reported over the last week are coming from within the White House -- and are clearly intended to undermine the president.

That's the conclusion coming from the news media itself, which is the obvious benefactor from the torrent of embarrassing intel being transmitted from the West Wing directly to major media newsrooms.

"It has to be acknowledged that had there are folks in the White House that are leaking things are not advantageous to the president and that’s a reality that he’s going to have to deal with,” MSNBC's Hans Nichols said Friday afternoon.

"President Trump is dealing with something other presidents haven’t necessarily had to deal with," Nichols explained. "That is, a remarkable amount of leaking within his own administration."

"I’ve covered the previous two presidents," he continued. "You just didn’t get readouts of things that the president of the United States was saying to his foreign leaders, not in real-time but at least ten, 12 days later. You had to wait weeks if not months, years for that to come out."

Charles Krauthammer reported the same.

"What’s unusual is the Niagara of leaks coming out of this White House," Krauthammer said on Fox News Friday night. "As you said, this had to have been somebody in the room, somebody who took the notes, who picked up the phone and read the notes."

"The problem here is an inner circle of people who have lost faith or are betraying or whatever," he continued. "But it is certainly not a leak problem that ought to interest us. It’s a loyalty problem inside the White House.”



The New York Times's David Brooks, whose paper published the most recent anti-Trump scoop, is also acknowledging the role Trump's own staff is playing in his undoing.

"The most interesting thing is that the White House staff and the people under Donald Trump at least some portion of them, seem to have turned against Donald Trump," Brooks said Friday night on PBS NewsHour. [Watch the clip] "I have not talked to the reporters that broke this story, but if I read it correctly, some senior White House official with top secret clearance read the readout to a reporter. That's breaking the law, that means you need to be Deep Throat, you need to undermine this guy, you need to get the truth out about this guy."

And in the Nixon administration, there were a couple of deep throats, there was a guy off in the FBI, who was willing to leak," the columnist continued. "But in this administration, they seem to be in every closet, and behind every desk, I'm exaggerating a little -- but there are squads of deep throats. And so that means this story's not only a legal investigation it is a dissolution of an administration."