Donald Trump, like virtually every president before him, is upset that there have been leaks to the news media (and heaven knows who else) from his administration.
In his Thursday press conference, Trump emphasized that leaks of classified information or matters relating to national security are "criminal" acts — because they are — and promised to pursue the leakers.
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That, and Trump's Friday afternoon tweet — that "The FAKE NEWS media ... is the enemy of the American People!" — was apparently enough to send the Washington Post's Margaret Sullivan scurrying under her bed, shaking in fear. Spare me the hysteria.
Sullivan believes that the above combination has "authoritarian echoes" (bolds are mine):
Could reporters be hunted down if Trump goes after leakers?
For those who care about press rights in America, President Trump’s words last week were stunning and disturbing.
The news media is not merely “scum,” as he has said many times before, but now “the enemy of the American People.”
This tweeted pronouncement, with its authoritarian echoes, came soon after Trump’s vow to stamp out the unauthorized flow of intelligence-community information to journalists. “I’ve actually called the Justice Department to look into the leaks,” he said. “Those are criminal leaks.”
Add up these two elements and you get a troubling question: Will the Trump administration’s crackdown on leaks include journalists as well as their sources?
Some knowledgeable lawyers and academics say it’s unlikely.
Although she cited the previous administration's far more aggressive actions in later paragraphs, Sullivan didn't apply the "authoritarian" tag to Barack Obama's administration, and certainly should have.
In any event, five paragraphs in, after a headline and four paragraphs designed to whip up hysteria, she found "some" people (likely almost everyone if not everyone she consulted) who essentially said, "Take a chill pill, ma'am."
She should have stopped there.
In trying to make her case, Sullivan imagined that there's a problem with involving the Justice Department in pursuing leaks:
That such things are changing already was evident in Trump’s statement, quoted above, about making an assignment for Justice Department officials — who, after all, are supposed to operate with a measure of independence, choosing their own cases, not as corporate functionaries reporting to the chief executive.
For heaven's sake, Margaret. The Justice Department almost always had a degree of independence until February 2, 2009, when Barack Obama's Attorney General nominee Eric Holder was confirmed. That independence completely disappeared during the next eight years. Giving the keys to the Justice Department to Jeff Sessions, someone genuinely interested in tough but fair law enforcement, is a huge improvement.
Of course, Sessions will follow some administration suggestions, as all AGs have — and it's not as if Justice hasn't been involved in pursuing and prosecuting Executive Branch security violations in the past. But Sessions is a welcome and long overdue departure from Holder and successor Loretta Lynch, under whom Justice's sole mission was to be Obama administration's agenda-supporting and political correctness-enforcing attack dogs. This posture was accompanied by a breathtaking level of corruption which was clearly visible less than three years in, and got worse from there.
While the left continues to propagate fiction about Russians "hacking" the election, no one seems to remember that Lynch's Justice Department intensely obstructed investigations into Hillary Clinton's illegal private server and criminal handling of classified information at every turn. That obvious, demonstrated obstruction did more to influence the election outcome — heck, it probably saved Mrs. Clinton from another Democratic Primary defeat, this time to Bernie Sanders — than the speculatively involved Russians could have ever dreamed of.
Sullivan eventually gave away her unacceptably absolutist mindset:
... democracy is built on their ability to serve as a check on government power. They need to be able to do their watchdog job unfettered, and to tell citizens at least some of what their government is doing in secret. A crucial part of that is the ability to promise confidentiality to sources.
Unfettered? Meaning "free from (any) restraints"? That would seem to include access to military battle plans, the release of which could get U.S. soldiers killed; details of secret programs in place to flush out terrorist activity; and other secret government negotiations. She wants access to everything, and then to have the press, the anointed gatekeepers, decide what they will "tell citizens." That hasn't worked out well since the Vietnam War, and in many instances even earlier.
At this point, there's absolutely no reason to expect that this arrangement will ever work out well. That's because, as Trump correctly asserted, the press has operated as the American people's enemy when a Republican is in the Oval Office, and as compliant apparatchik lapdogs when Democrats rule the White House roost. Their aggressiveness in the former role, and passivity in the latter (while also serving as guard dogs fighting people trying to do the job they won't do when Democrats are in power), have both increased markedly at least since journalists dedicated themselves so blatantly to the election of Bill Clinton a quarter-century ago.
To name just two relatively recent and history-altering examples:
- In 2006, Bush 43's SWIFT terrorist finance-detecting program got disclosed, despite pleas from the administration and "the active resistance of prominent officials, both in and out of government, who virtually begged the paper on a bipartisan basis to can this story."
- In early 2013, the Associated Press learned about preliminary Obama administration negotiations with Iran, chose to keep them secret from the American people for eight months at the Obama administration's request, and then bragged about the fact that they had kept the secret once the administration gave them the all-clear in November. That indefensible secrecy greatly assisted the progress towards what ultimately became a deeply flawed nuclear deal which Congress and the American people bitterly opposed.
Excuse me for believing that the press doesn't have the ability to exercise even a shred of adult judgment in deciding what they will "tell citizens." Only two questions seem to matter: "Who will this help?" and "Who will this hurt?"
Finally, Sullivan made an honest admission, but it was label-free:
If the Trump administration goes down the dangerous road of eroding those freedoms, it’s the Obama administration that will have set those wheels in motion. Nine times during the past eight years, the Justice Department used the once-obscure Espionage Act to prosecute leakers — three times the usage of any other administration since the law was enacted 100 years ago.
And reporters were drawn into the fray.
Despite the damning evidence she presented, and despite calling a president who has only been in office on month as having "authoritarian echoes," Sullivan didn't have the integrity to call the Obama administration "authoritarian."
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
