Laying traps for the leakers

President Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has told several White House staffers he's fed specific nuggets of information to suspected leakers to see if they pass them on to reporters — a trap that would confirm his suspicions.

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As Politico first reported, the administration has interviewed people with access to the intelligence that the Russians were paying the Taliban bounties to kill American soldiers. A senior White House official confirmed Politico's reporting that they have narrowed down the list of suspects to fewer than 10 people.

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A former White House official said the one time Mulvaney did take evidence to Trump that he presented as damaging, the president dismissed it.

  Axios

That's weird. Did it involve Jared?

In January, Mulvaney asked the White House's IT department to search the work cellphone records of senior staff.

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After getting back the spreadsheet and finding senior staff contacts with reporters to be mostly unremarkable, Mulvaney zeroed in on what he thought were some unusual phone calls for White House Counsel Pat Cipollone.

Mulvaney, who had been in a bitter feud with Cipollone, had already told Trump he thought the White House counsel was a leaker.

When he'd made those accusations, Trump replied, "The guy doesn't even talk to the press. Never has," said a source familiar with their interactions.

The spreadsheet the IT department produced for Mulvaney in mid-January showed that Cipollone had multiple phone calls with the New York Times' Maggie Haberman and CNN's Pamela Brown.

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A former administration official familiar with the impeachment defense defended Cipollone. "Pat was encouraged by the president to talk with the media because the president viewed him as a strong advocate on his behalf. This was part of a coordinated effort.

So why did Trump say Cipollone "doesn't even talk to the press"?

Trump went into a fury about leakers in late 2019 and early 2020. Trump told multiple members of staff it was a high priority to find "Anonymous," the senior administration official who wrote a viral New York Times op-ed and later a bestselling book describing Trump as dangerously unfit and unstable.

The White House procured authorship attribution software to match Anonymous' writing style against internal writing samples from current administration officials. But the software was difficult to use and the effort failed, according to a senior administration official.

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In early December, Trump told a senior White House staffer it would be "a better use of your time to stay here and find f---ing Anonymous" rather than join the president on his trip to London for the NATO summit, according to a source familiar with the exchange.

The staffer went on the trip, nonetheless. Seven months later, Anonymous is still at large.[Trump's trade adviser Peter] Navarro's [own] investigation culminated in a lengthy memo citing stylistic analysis, biographical information, a Reddit post and a defunct blog to allege that the author was former national security staffer Victoria Coates. She vehemently denied the charge and retained counsel.

Other highlights of the White House's leak hunts include former press secretary Sean Spicer forcing his own staff to dump their phones on a table for an impromptu phone search — an interrogation that itself immediately leaked.

LOL.

And former communications director Anthony Scaramucci famously threatened to fire all the leakers, but at the same time... well this Vox headline sums it up: "Anthony Scaramucci leaked that he would fire a press aide, then complained about the leak."

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"A good chief of staff knows that the best way to prevent damaging leaks is to stop doing illegal, stupid stuff. You don't have to be James Baker to figure that out."

But you do have to be smarter than the present occupant of the oval office.