On July 6, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs issued a scathing report detailing what the Committee characterized as a seething epidemic of classified information making its way into the press. Titled, “State Secrets: How an Avalanche of Media Leaks Is Harming National Security,” the 23-page document cites “at least 125 stories” between Inauguration day and May 25 “with leaked information potentially damaging to national security.” That last part is debatable. While the report, which was commissioned by the Republican majority, does include a handful of truly astonishing disclosures—things like FISA warrants and transcripts of private phone calls with foreign leaders—most of the document essentially reads like a chronology of what the public has learned about the interlocking investigations into the Trump administration and its potential ties to Russia. The bylines of New York Times and Washington Post reporters are especially prolific. “Listing individual reporters who allegedly harmed national security is something that illiberal nations do,” the Committee to Protect Journalists wrote in response.
The report was provided to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who would stand before a podium one month later and announce that the Trump administration had already tripled the amount of leak investigations pursued under Barack Obama, whose administration had in turn been more aggressive about hunting down sources than any other since Nixon’s. “I strongly agree with the president and condemn in the strongest terms the staggering number of leaks undermining the ability of our government to protect this country,” Sessions said. “We are taking a stand. This culture of leaking must stop. . . . So, today, I have this message for the intelligence community: the Department of Justice is open for business. And I have this warning for would-be leakers: don’t do it.”
Consternation about the report was particularly high in The Washington Post’s newsroom, not only because 33 of its journalists’ stories were in the crosshairs, but also because “State Secrets” was being promoted on Twitter by one of their own. Jerry Markon was a longtime Post reporter who covered the Department of Homeland Security until February, when he left the paper to work for the Committee on Homeland Security as senior policy adviser to its chairman, Senator Ron Johnson. When the report landed, along with six retweets from Markon touting its findings, jaws hit the floor. At least one of Markon’s former colleagues, according to people with knowledge of the matter, e-mailed him to ask if he’d written the report himself. Adam Goldman, who worked with Markon at the Post and even shared some bylines with him, was blunt in his assessment. “Many former colleagues at the Post were disappointed,” Goldman told me. “It was a betrayal.” (I reached out to Markon through the Committee’s press office but he was not made available.) A Johnson aide emphasized that Johnson’s “concern is about the leakers and the national-security threats their leaks pose, not individual journalists.”
I spoke with more than half a dozen national-security journalists at several major news organizations to get their take on the current climate. The conversations were overwhelmingly off the record, either because these reporters have a policy of keeping discussions pertaining to their tradecraft offline, or because they didn’t want to inflame hostilities or play into the government’s hands. (Indeed, some were of the opinion that a story like this one would do more harm than good.) Goldman, who now covers the F.B.I. for the Times, and who was the only one of the group to give me a quote for attribution, summed up the state of play like this: “We can’t do our jobs effectively if we have to run around fearful the government is always watching us. We’re journalists, not spies.”
And yet many journalists these days do have to acts like spies. That’s not exactly new. Back in the 70s, Bob Woodward resorted to moving a flowerpot around on his balcony in order to arrange post-midnight meetings with Deep Throat. As the government in recent years has become more heavy-handed about cracking down on whistleblowers, and as electronic surveillance has become increasingly sophisticated, reporters have in turn become increasingly sophisticated about communicating through encryption and other highly secure methods.
Trump’s election was not a total sea change. Those who spoke with me agreed that the previous administration laid the groundwork for the current leak jihad. But his very public war on the press, along with his suspicion of his own intelligence agencies, has significantly raised the temperature. The president has toyed publicly with the idea of putting reporters in jail, so it’s no surprise that journalists and sources are on edge. “I’ve seen a perceptible change that impacts my day-to-day job since literally the day after he won the election,” one of the reporters I spoke with said, describing “lots of dark humor from trusted sources.”
Another said, “We’ve always taken great steps to protect our sources. Now we’re taking steps like we’ve never taken before.” Even casual sources who used to be fine exchanging quick e-mails or texts now insist on using Signal, an encrypted messaging app that has become the whisper tool de rigueur because it enables people to speak or send messages to one another without fingerprints. Disposable phones are another trick of the trade that came up in my conversations, as well as two other ingenious technologies: face-to-face meetings and snail mail.
All of this judicious paranoia extends beyond the realm of high-level intel revelations that may result in new prosecutions under Trump. “A lot of people talk late at night in this administration,” said Times reporter and longtime Trump chronicler Maggie Haberman, a master of the sort of inside-the-room palace intrigue scoops that also are a hallmark of today’s White House coverage. She was being interviewed on an episode of the Longform podcast last month: “There’s a real fear for most people that they’re being monitored in some way. People use different kinds of phones. . . . People are scared.”
Fear has not stopped the torrent of previously secret information, which has come much more frequently than it did during Obama’s two terms. One veteran NatSec scribe told me there was a certain amount of reverence for Obama within the government and intelligence apparatus: “People treated Obama like a cult figure. Some people view Trump more as the Godfather.”
Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and editor in chief of the national security-oriented Web site Lawfare, that rare journalist with substantial sympathy for the secrecy concerns of the NatSec bureaucracy, is skeptical of the notion of a deep-state war on the administration. He broke down the Trump era’s leak phenomenon into a few general buckets: information-control problems among the palace guard as it contends with fractious administration figures competing for the president’s attention, and often screwing each other in the process; disenfranchisement among career bureaucrats who are willing to dish to reporters because they see what’s going on and they’re disturbed by some of it; and disclosures that flow from the high-level investigations being pursued by Congress and the executive branch. “These are very different categories of leaks, and I don’t think anybody knows what the balance is,” he told me. “It is fair to say that there are a lot of people in the government who are appalled, and those people are much more likely to talk to journalists than when they’re not appalled. When you have a president who himself dishes classified information to an adversarial foreign power, why should anybody else protect him?”
Leaking is often a continuation of bureaucratic struggles by other means. There are always officials who want certain pieces of information to become public, but they are restrained by what Wittes has described as their own oaths of good behavior—“a belief in the underlying project,” he said, “and a sense that in the main, the government is on the side of good and justice, and that the system will work better if they behave according to the rules. This situation tests that for a lot of people.”
Wittes continued: “I’m not at all uncomfortable with people saying that stuff shouldn’t leak.” But mostly, he said, Trump is “complaining about the wrong thing. If the issue is inappropriate disclosure of classified information and programs, those leaks should be taken seriously. The problem is when you conflate that stuff with any disclosure that the president finds inconvenient.”
Given the current tensions, news organizations are making sure their security protocols are air tight. The Washington Post recently brought in an investigative-services firm called the Mintz Group to give the paper’s national-security and national-politics teams a refresher on best practices, a person with knowledge of the meeting said. Topics covered: what to do if you feel like you’re being surveilled, the virtues of in-person meetings versus phone conversations, and so on. (The Post wouldn’t comment.) Since the election, outlets including the Post, the Times, and BuzzFeed have set up confidential electronic tip lines through which sources can pass information along securely and anonymously. Gizmodo Media Group’s version was perhaps the most brazen: “Tell On Trump.”
The current, blustering buildup to a prospective leak war has a faint whiff of the North Korea standoff—lots of tough talk but no visible evidence that a conflagration looks imminent. If the Justice Department has indeed “more than tripled the number of active leak investigations compared to the number pending at the end of the last Administration,” as the attorney general said, the vast majority of those investigations remain a mystery. The only confirmed case to date is that of Reality Winner, a National Security Agency contractor charged in June with giving The Intercept an intelligence report about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. (She has pleaded not guilty.) It was an instance in which Winner as well as one of the journalists who reported on the information she allegedly provided both made missteps that may have helped the government identify her.
But reporters are still wary. As one said: “There’s definitely a vulnerability. If you get to a place where half the country wants to see the media in prison, there’s a risk somebody’s gonna go to prison.”
