Trump will continue his war on media, but how far will he take it?

By Clarence Page

Monday, Feb. 27, 2017 | 2 a.m.

Since facts tend to be pliable in the custody of President Donald Trump, one wonders what comes next with his self-declared “running war with the media.”

His constant cries of “fake news” to any news that does not blow him a kiss ratcheted up to a more threatening tone when he sent this recent tweet:

“The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”

With that he escalated from mere trolling to the ominous bombast of a tinpot dictatorship. A cooler head, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, assured us that at least he did not view the media as the enemy. Still, I was left wondering what his boss has in mind.

That’s our reality show president. Remember, during last year’s election campaign, how delighted he was by the unauthorized and unlawful leaks that came from hacks of the Democratic National Committee emails?

But that was then. Now his cheerleading for leaks against other people has turned to condemnation of secrets leaked from his own administration.

The president was particularly upset by the departure of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn after he admitted to misleading Vice President Mike Pence about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador about U.S. sanctions before Trump took office.

Trump praised the departed Flynn as “a wonderful man” who “has been treated very, very unfairly by the media.” Even though it was Trump, not the media, who fired Flynn, media tend to be too inviting of a target for Trump to resist.

A couple of days before he put the media on the same level as the Islamic State and other public enemies, he fumed in a morning tweet: “Information is being illegally given to the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost by the intelligence community (NSA and FBI?). Just like Russia.”

A few hours later, he sounded like the “shocked, shocked” prefect of police in “Casablanca” as he tweeted about “classified information (being) illegally given out by ‘intelligence’ like candy. Very un-American!”

Un-American? On the contrary, Mr. Trump, welcome to Washington.

Get used to it. You are hardly the first president to discover that our great ship of state leaks like a sieve.

Washington’s biggest scandals often begin with leaks. Think of the Pentagon Papers, the Iran-Contra affair, the Panama Papers or the Wikileaks disclosures by soldier Chelsea Manning and former CIA employee Edward Snowden.

Leaks big and small are so common that Stephen Hess, a senior fellow emeritus at Brookings Institution and veteran of four presidential administrations beginning with Dwight Eisenhower’s, once categorized types of leaks in a book.

They included the “ego leak” to satisfy a sense of self, the “policy leak” to bring attention to a proposed policy change, the “trial balloon leak” to test out a proposed idea, the “whistleblower leak” to bring attention to a problem or idea via the press after getting nowhere internally, and the “animus leak” to settle grudges.

Yet, as much as every president is frustrated and infuriated by leaks, the laws against leaking are almost never enforced. That could change under Trump, who ironically would have new tools left by President Barack Obama’s administration.

A 2013 report by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, on whose board I sit, found that Obama had pursued the most aggressive “war on leaks” since President Richard Nixon’s leak-fixing “plumbers” led to the Watergate scandal.

Under Obama, the Justice Department pursued not only sources and whistleblowers but also journalists, including James Rosen at Fox News and Jim Risen at The New York Times. As with most earlier cases of this sort, the government backed away from that pursuit.

Is Trump just blowing off steam through his Twitter account, or could his war escalate into full legal combat, putting reporters in jeopardy of jail for doing their jobs? He might find that pursuit to be more trouble than it’s worth. The public might prefer to have the information than see journalists go to jail.

Besides, putting reporters in jail might just backfire and make journalists, Trump’s favorite foils, actually look sympathetic. He might well prefer to leave us free — and an easier scapegoat to kick around some more.

Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.