Just when things were looking up for the U.S. in its standoff with North Korea — with the U.N. Security Council, in a rare moment of unity, voting 15-0 to impose what it called “the strongest sanctions ever imposed in response to a ballistic missile test” — two major leaks of classified information on Tuesday ratcheted the tensions between Washington and Pyongyang to new levels.
Unlike other leaks from the intelligence community that have appeared to be designed to undermine the president’s agenda, I’m convinced these two “leaks” were deliberate, and likely directed.
stormpetrels and miniature nukes
In the morning, President Trump tweeted a story from Fox News reporting that satellites had detected North Korea loading two “Stormpetrel” anti-ship missiles aboard a guided-missile patrol boat, something they hadn’t done since 2014. Observers saw the move as a possible indicator of impending additional nuclear or missile tests. When asked about this story, a surprised Ambassador Nikki Haley refused to comment, citing the classified nature of any such information.
Then around 1 pm EDT, the Washington Post published, pardon me, a bombshell: intelligence officials believe North Korea has miniaturized a nuclear warhead that can fit on the nose of its new intercontinental ballistic missile. Taken together, these two pieces of information put the nuclear standoff with Korea on a new level. By late afternoon, the president was warning that future threats against the United States “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
(For those alarmed by the statement, I remind you that Trump is hardly the first American president to employ this type of language. in 1993, President Bill Clinton said that if North Korea were ever to use a nuclear weapon, “it would mean the end of their country as they know it.”)
when a leak isn’t really a leak
The morning’s anti-ship missile story in particular gave cable news talking heads no small amount of glee, as they pointed to the president supposedly unwittingly praising the very thing he’s been railing against for weeks. And the suggestion that this information might have been leaked deliberately was met, quite literally, with howls of derision.
It seems some in the media want you to forget they know how the game is played. Our current vocabulary doesn’t really do a good job of distinguishing between the malicious unauthorized release of information, which the government wants to protect and which the leaker hopes will hurt the administration’s position, and the intentional, though still anonymous, release of information the government wants to make public. We call both of them leaks, but they’re worlds apart.
Quite often, the “senior White House official, speaking on the condition on anonymity” cited in news reports is the chief of staff himself, who for obvious reasons cannot speak about some sensitive topics on the record, but who believes, with the president’s concurrence, that certain information needs to be public.
Sometimes that’s because they believe the public simply needs to know. Sometimes it’s to confirm for an adversary that we know something. Sometimes it’s just to undercut the opposition, or bolster the administration’s position. But those pieces of information, although sourced anonymously, are part of an official plan.
We’ve said it before: individual government employees do not get to decide unilaterally that a certain piece of information should be made public. But if the president wants to discuss classified information publicly, that is his prerogative. It’s fair to question the wisdom of such a move; it’s not fair to question his authority to do it.
And it is not at all hypocritical for the president to decry those unauthorized leaks, or to direct his administration to find and prosecute the leakers, while directing others to leak information he chooses to make public. It’s not a difficult concept. Pity that so few pundits seem to get it.
