The Leak War

CNN noted a number of the documents were compiled by a former British intelligence agent and reportedly presented to Obama and Trump by four of America’s most senior intelligence officials—Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI director James Comey, CIA director John Brennan, and NSA director Admiral Mike Rogers. The report was noticeably bereft of specific details about the information in the documents.

Enter BuzzFeed, which followed up by actually publishing the 35-page dossier at the heart of CNN’s report. It was an opposition research report that had been circulating in D.C. for months. No one had reported on its existence—save Mother Jones‘s David Corn—because the allegations were outrageous and unverifiable. Some of the claims were demonstrably false, as BuzzFeed itself admitted (“the report contains errors”). The report, it turned out, had been commissioned and compiled by Fusion GPS, a shadowy opposition-research firm with a reputation for doing black-bag work, primarily at the behest of Democrats, though the original paymasters for the Trump dossier may have been Republican. Fusion GPS last made national news in 2012 for harassing Romney donors during Obama’s reelection campaign.

BuzzFeed‘s publication of raw, unverified accusations that Trump had, among other things, hired Russian prostitutes was a shocking departure from American journalistic standards. But in hot pursuit of clicks, BuzzFeed may have served one useful end: They exposed the rotten foundation underlying CNN’s ominous-sounding news. Had they not done so, Trump might have been inaugurated under a cloud of baseless speculation and calls for congressional investigations. The real question is why CNN’s heavyweight journalists—one of the four bylines was none other than Carl Bernstein—would sign off on allegations of such dubious provenance, when their own report admits they had “not independently corroborated the specific allegations.”

The obvious answer is the news value of the incoming and outgoing presidents having been briefed on the exist­ence of the dossier. But these briefings are highly classified. So how did CNN learn what it reported? The likeliest source would be one of the top intelligence officials, whose imprimatur would have given CNN the confidence to run with the story. The scenario is all too plausible. It wasn’t that long ago that Democrats—who today are outraged to hear even a discouraging word uttered about the probity of the intelligence community—were themselves outraged at Clapper for misleading Congress about NSA surveillance programs. Brennan, for his part, has been publicly criticizing Trump in harsh terms. And Democrats have their own well-known axe to grind with Comey.

Make no mistake, there is a leak war against Trump going on. The breathless revelations in the press that Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, has been repeatedly calling the Russians—something only intelligence officials are likely to know about—is proof enough of that. There are of course many reasons why an incoming national security adviser might be speaking to foreign interlocutors, and there has been no presidential transition in modern times without the incoming team of officials having such contacts with their foreign counterparts. Trump officials later said Flynn called to offer condolences on Russia’s assassinated Turkish ambassador and, again, to offer condolences about a plane carrying a Russian choir shot down bound for Syria. This seems plausible, though no one not on the calls can know for sure. But the ominous spin the press put on Flynn’s phone calls is alarmism for alarmism’s sake.

There are substantive reasons to be concerned about the Trump administration’s Russia policy, and there are serious and unanswered questions about the potential entanglement of Trump’s finances and Russian interests. A sober and responsible press corps would focus on such things. And intelligence professionals, for their part, can share their fears with oversight committees on Capitol Hill; they best serve their country by leaving politics to the politicians.

If the intelligence community is just now sounding alarms about Russia’s creeping influence, then they weren’t doing their jobs under the last president. And if they can’t orchestrate a media campaign less clumsy than this one against Trump, one wonders how skilled they really are. By desperately lobbing spurious accusations, not only have leakers from the intelligence services created a spectacle that has embarrassed the country in the eyes of foreign leaders more than it has embarrassed the incoming president, they may have insulated President Trump from needed criticism when he holds the reins of power.

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated a plane was shot down over Syria. The plane was bound for Syria.