Scale of media leaks against Trump indicates US Deep State coup agenda
Finian Cunningham
SputnikNews.com
6 Aug, 2017
The unprecedented level of unauthorized media leaks aimed at damaging president Donald Trump over the past six months is an issue that goes way beyond freedom of press rights. It’s a sign of how powerful, secretive forces within the US state want this president ousted.
This week, US attorney general Jeff Sessions claimed the number of Justice Department investigations into government leaks had tripled compared with under the Obama administration. If that’s the case, then that marks an extraordinary extent of insubordination against president Trump.
As the Washington Post reported: “It was the first public confirmation of the breadth of the Justice Department’s efforts to crack down on unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information.”
Who is behind the leaks? It could be from employees within the administration, working at the State Department or DOJ. It could be from people within the president’s staff at the White House, as the ugly spat last week between former communications chief Anthony Scaramucci and former chief of staff Reince Priebus appeared to indicate.
More likely though, the flood of leaks over the past six months since Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president, has come from people within the intelligence agencies. That’s the informed assessment of former State Department official James Jatras.
The intelligence nexus – including the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation – are also the forces which would have complete and total access to all electronic communications, not just out of the White House, but across the entire world. Former NSA staff, like whistleblowers Edward Snowden and William Binney, have confirmed the technical capacity for such unlawful surveillance against US citizens and indeed foreign leaders, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The anti-Trump news media in the US have tended to relate the leaking issue to the right of free speech. The attorney general’s announcement that the Justice Department and FBI are to go after leakers more aggressively, as well as consider the possibility of prosecuting media reporters for publishing articles based on leaked information, have been criticized as having a “chilling effect” on free speech.
Sessions, the attorney general, said that law enforcement officers would review policy on subpoenaing journalists to reveal sources. Refusal to reveal sources could result in prosecution and jail sentences for reporters. Such a development would indeed denote a serious infringement of accepted journalistic protections.
Nevertheless, such First Amendment concerns over the right to free speech in this context seem rather contorted. The facts seem to indicate that the Trump presidency is being assailed by anonymous political enemies and that the media leaks are a key battleground for undermining his authority.
Surely, the more disconcerting issue is how secretive agencies have been waging a non-stop media campaign over the past six months to destabilize an elected president. It seems misplaced to treat the issue, and the latest reaction of the Trump administration, as simply a matter of press freedom – when a full-on information war is being conducted to damage Trump.
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