Close friends and top advisers to President Trump are incensed by the recurring flow of damaging information from the West Wing.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders scolded her team last week after an anonymous communications official leaked an insensitive comment by Trump aide Kelly Sadler about Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain’s brain cancer. But when details of that anti-leaks meeting also appeared in the news, allies of the administration began contemplating what more can be done to prevent such disclosures.
The answer, they fear, is nothing short of a mass firing.
Sadler is under mounting pressure to apologize for downplaying McCain’s opposition to Gina Haspel, Trump’s nomination to head the CIA. His disapproval doesn’t matter, she told colleagues in a staff meeting last week, because “he’s dying anyway.” While Sadler continues to face calls for her resignation, her coworkers have been more concerned with how it wound up in print last Thursday.
The leak has contributed to “a very difficult work environment,” where White House aides fear betrayal by deskmates and are less inclined to speak candidly in daily meetings, deputy press secretary Raj Shah said Monday, adding that the Sadler situation was being handled “internally.”
[Anthony Scaramucci: Fire the White House aides who leaked McCain ‘dying’ joke]
Trump’s struggle with leaks is nothing new. When chief of staff John Kelly took the reins last July, unauthorized disclosures to the press was one of the first issues he worked to fix. His predecessor had tried unsuccessfully to address the problem, and some of the actions Kelly took later proved equally ineffective.
“Early on they would put reporters on blacklists,” a person close to the White House told the Washington Examiner. “If a reporter got blacklisted on the inside, the people who were leaking to them were less likely to leak. If someone’s on the ‘do not help’ list, staff is just going to be less likely to talk to them.”
In January, Kelly enacted a ban on personal cellphones and smart watches inside the West Wing. The decision was meant “to protect White House information technology infrastructure from compromise and sensitive or classified information from unauthorized access or dissemination,” he wrote in a memo to staff, which leaked to reporters hours after Trump’s chief of staff hit send.
Staffers who deliberately ignored, or were found in violation of the policy, could be “indefinitely prohibited from entering the White House complex,” Kelly wrote at the time. CNN reported Tuesday that lockers were installed inside the White House, where staffers could drop off their phones in the morning and retrieve them at the end of each work day. The White House reportedly carries out sweeps from time to time to ensure no personal devices are hidden around the West Wing.
But the cellphone ban hasn’t stopped leaks from occurring.
White House officials still speak with reporters throughout the day and have developed a tendency to air their grievances, whether about annoying colleagues or competing policy priorities, in the press.
“There are different leaks from different people,” explained one former White House official, categorizing the culprits as “people who leak over personal clashes, people who leak because of policy disagreements, and the people who don’t actually like the president and leak to reporters as their outlet.”
In the phone-ban era, aides with private offices will sometimes use their desk phones to speak to reporters, while others will grab their personal devices and call or text during lunch breaks.
“The cellphone ban is for when people are inside the West Wing, so it really doesn’t do all that much to prevent leaks,” said a source familiar with the policy. “If they banned all personal cellphones from the entire [White House] grounds, all that would do is make reporters stay up later because they couldn’t talk to their sources until after 6:30pm.”
Two sources close to the White House said the reality is that leaks won’t end unless Trump makes changes to his staff. But one of the sources said the president still runs the risk of targeting the wrong people: tight-lipped staffers who are accused of leaking by colleagues who actually leak and wish to protect themselves.
“The biggest open secret in the White House is that most of the significant leaks aren’t coming from lower or mid-level staff, they’re coming from senior staff,” this person said. “But they’ll probably end up firing some lower and mid-level staffers as a show of force and it won’t change anything leaking-wise in the end.”
Some of the president’s allies think the leaks have become so pervasive that a major shake-up is needed in the West Wing.
“Making the case for a full house cleaning!” Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser to Trump’s 2020 campaign, said on Tuesday in response to a tweet about leaking.
Charlie Kirk, an unquestioningly loyal Trump supporter, urged him to immediately fire all leakers. Kirk, who interviewed Trump during a White House-sanctioned panel in March, simultaneously threatened to expose two staffers whom he accused of leaking.
“They should resign before I call them out publicly,” he tweeted on Tuesday.
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told Fox News on Monday evening that she had spoken with Trump earlier in the day and expects there to be some personnel changes because of the recent leaks. Conway was described last month as “the No. 1 leaker” by longtime Trump pal and veteran journalist Ronald Kessler.
