White House chief of staff Mark Meadows reportedly put a plan into motion to root out leakers.
Meadows, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina, aims to identify White House staffers who make unauthorized disclosures to the media by providing specific bits of information that he can trace back to individual staffers, according to Axios. Thus far, Meadows has caught one person responsible for a minor leak.
“Meadows told me he was doing that. I don’t know if it ever worked,” one former White House official told Axios‘s Jonathan Swan.
President Trump is reportedly frustrated with two recent leaks in particular: one involving intelligence on Russia paying bounties to Taliban-connected militants in Afghanistan to kill U.S. soldiers, and another about Trump being rushed down to a bunker as protesters gathered outside the White House.
Meadows has not identified the leakers of those stories, but a source told the outlet that Meadows is “focused on national security leaks and could care less about the palace intrigue stories.”
During a recent appearance on The Verdict podcast with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and conservative commentator Michael Knowles, Meadows said the White House discovered who leaked a draft of Trump’s executive order designed to limit censorship on social media, adding that they “no longer work for the federal government.”
“All the sudden, this proposed EO shows up in the New York Times. And it was really fed to the New York Times by a federal worker that didn’t agree with this administration, or at least it appears that they didn’t. And they didn’t agree with the EO, and so they took it and fed it to outside sources. And I’m glad to say we were able to track that person down. They no longer work for the federal government,” Meadows said at the time.
