TRUMP INSIDERS DENOUNCE DEMOCRAT LEAKS

 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN DEMOCRATS, TRUMP JUSTICE DEPARTMEN

The Free Beacon has an interesting story, based on interviews of unnamed Trump administration officials, about the Obama minions, some still embedded in the bureaucracy, who are leaking furiously to the Washington Post and the New York Times:

A new wave of leaks targeting the Trump administration has actively endangered ongoing intelligence and military operations being conducted by the United States and its allies, sparking anger and concern inside and outside the White House, according to multiple conversations with senior U.S. officials intimately familiar with the situation.

The classified leaks, which are being handed to sympathetic journalists by former Obama administration officials who left the government and by holdovers still serving in the Trump administration, have damaged a number of ongoing operations, ranging from American efforts to prevent Russian infiltration of the United States to Israeli efforts against ISIS, sources said.

The Democrats pretend to be concerned about Russia, but have no compunction about interfering with the Trump administration’s efforts to deal with the Russian threat (which Obama, to his everlasting shame, didn’t). The Obama administration never pretended to be concerned about Israel’s security, so I guess we can’t accuse them of hypocrisy on that one.

Anger is running so high that multiple current U.S. officials have named some of the former Obama officials they believe are behind the unauthorized disclosures, which Trump officials say are aimed at kneecapping the current administration and also rewriting the record of the Obama years.
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The leaks have been traced to a number of former Obama administration officials, including Ben Rhodes—the former National Security Council official responsible for creating an in-house ‘echo chamber’ meant to mislead reporters and the public about the landmark nuclear deal with Iran—and Colin Kahl, former Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser.

Another source, this one a senior administration official who is also intimately familiar with the situation, confirmed the assessment to the Washington Free Beacon.

“Those responsible for the disastrous foreign national security policy of the Obama administration for the last years—Ben Rhodes, Colin Kahl—they provide the marching orders to a broader group of people that are associated with the broader [Democratic Party] Podesta-Clinton network, and now they’re trying to rewrite history at the cost of American national security,” the official said.

The leakers and reporters need to be criminally prosecuted. We keep hearing that the Trump administration is serious about doing this, but it is time for action. I am not a criminal lawyer and don’t presume to give advice to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former U.S. Attorney and long time member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But I would think one way to proceed is to impanel a grand jury and subpoena the reporters who have illegally published leaked information, and ask them their sources. There is no federal shield law, so as I understand it, if they refuse they can be imprisoned indefinitely. (This happened to Judith Miller.) The sources don’t seem to be much of a mystery, and the reporters and editors obviously aren’t. So it is time for the law to come down hard on the leakers and their enablers.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/06/trump-insiders-denounce-democrat-leaks.php