by Paul Bedard
Should President Trump need a model to use to track down leakers inside his administration like the “anonymous” insider who challenged his authority in a New York Times op-ed, he need go no further back than the Obama administration that prosecuted leakers and shutout the media.
According to reports at the time from even New York Times journalists, no administration was tougher on leakers and punishing to the media than Obama’s, a saga reinforced by reporters who have called Trump’s team more forthcoming.
Criticism of Obama’s attacks on the media and leakers did not just come in tweets and TV appearances by journalists but in an official report from the Committee to Protect Journalists, authored by former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr.
“This is the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever covered,” said David E. Sanger, veteran chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times, in the report.
USA Today said of the report, it “portrays an administration gripped by strict policies about information flow and paranoid about leaks across all executive branch departments.”
It detailed prosecutions and even the use of lie-detectors on staffers. Some have encouraged Trump to use lie-detector tests on his staff, something he has so far ignored.
While Trump has ripped leakers and the anonymous Times writer of being cowards and traitors, it was Obama who took the war to a higher level by targeting staff and reporters while also cutting out the media to promote its story via social media.
“The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in the Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent,” wrote Downie in the report that was criticized by Obama officials.
The campaign was so aggressive it even had a name, said the report: “The Insider Threat Program.”
Said the 2013 report, “The Insider Threat Program being implemented throughout the Obama administration to stop leaks—first detailed by the McClatchy newspapers’ Washington bureau in late June—has already ‘created internal surveillance, heightened a degree of paranoia in government and made people conscious of contacts with the public, advocates, and the press,’ said a prominent transparency advocate, Steven Aftergood, director of the Government Secrecy Project at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington.”
Employees at some 16 intelligence agencies faced questions about leaking during lie-detector tests.
“And the new inspector general for the intelligence community, with jurisdiction over all its agencies, would investigate leak cases that had not produced prosecutions by the Justice Department to determine what alternative action should be taken,” added the report.