Wednesday, April 18, 2018 | 2 a.m.
View more of the Sun's opinion section
View more of the Sun's opinion section
With their condemnations of former FBI director James Comey, President Donald Trump and his mouthpieces are doing their best to characterize leaking as a dirty, damaging business.
“LEAKER & LIAR,” the president raged on Twitter.
“A self-admitted leaker,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders said during a White House press briefing.
“He’s an admitted leaker,” Kellyanne Conway said on “Good Morning America.”
Admitted leaker — sounds like they’re saying Comey’s guilty of a crime.
But there are two major problems with that message.
First, it suggests that all leaking is harmful, which is 100 percent not the case. When done responsibly, leaking can help cure what ails our democracy by exposing impropriety and setting change into motion.
Take Watergate. The then-anonymous source who supplied Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with information about criminality in the Nixon administration, Deep Throat, was a government leaker. He was later identified as Mark Felt, the FBI’s assistant director during 1972 and 1973.
The lawlessness discovered through the Watergate investigation was a broad-based conspiracy that led to 40 government officials being indicted or incarcerated, so there’s no question that leaking was good for the American people in that case.
And that’s just one example. Some of the most important leaking happens at the municipal, county and state levels, when people loyal to the public interest blow the whistle on improprieties by elected officials and administrators. That saves lives, literally.
So despite what Trump and his crew would have Americans believe, leaking often is done by well-intended public servants as a final recourse when they think the government won’t clean itself up.
That being the case, what Trump is really trying to do with his blanket condemnation is impose a code of silence — an omerta, to use a Mafia term. He’s demanding that government employees and others not talk about him without his permission, and to be loyal to him regardless of what he does.
That’s the dangerous business here, not what Comey has done. Trump acts as if the entire government has obligations to him. It doesn’t. Instead, the obligation of those in positions of authority is to serve the American people and the Constitution.
The second major problem with the White House’s condemnations, at least in Trump’s case, is that there’s no factual evidence to support that Comey leaked anything other than memos that he had written to document his interactions with Trump.
The memos were not classified, and there’s been no indication that Comey has shared any information that would put Americans in harm’s way. Had that been the case, then this situation would be an entirely different matter.
As is, though, the memos were appropriate for public consumption.
Comey said he released them after he was fired and Trump issued a tweet saying Comey “better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”
Comey’s goal in leaking was to trigger the appointment of a special counsel, he said. So far, there’s no reason to doubt that he was acting for the public good.
Again, this would be a completely different situation if Comey had leaked classified, intelligence-related info. Those who leak such material are still called traitors, and rightly so.
But when people come forward responsibly with info that would expose wrongdoing, we need to protect them.
There are lots of things in government that need to be secret, but the vast majority of activities in our government should always take place in the full light of day.
