Democrats in Congress will demand to know more about those conversations now, and especially what Mr. Trump knew of them. But that may not even be the administration’s biggest headache. The issue that has always been looming just behind the Flynn controversy is the more explosive question of whether there were covert contacts between the Trump team and Russian representatives in an attempt to influence the presidential campaign.
The inquiry can intensify in several ways in the weeks ahead. Democrats are pressing for a joint House-Senate intelligence committee inquiry, or the formation of a select committee specifically charged with investigating the question of Russian interference in the election.
.. If Republicans balk at going those routes—and signals so far suggest they would—then Democrats will try to increase pressure publicly. In that effort, they may find friends in the intelligence community. It’s clear that the president has made enemies within the intelligence world, who appear willing to leak what they are finding on the Russia connection if there isn’t an official route by which it can surface.
.. There are multiple power centers within the White House, but it may be that Mr. Pence will emerge from the Flynn episode as a particularly important one. Mr. Pence seemed irritated enough at being misled by Mr. Flynn to have acted on the irritation, rather than letting it pass.
.. Mr. Pence has always had the potential to emerge as a dominant player
.. That hasn’t been the case so far with Mr. Priebus, in part because Mr. Trump reportedly has only recently indicated that he wants him to exert that kind of control.
How easy is it to securely leak information to some of America’s top news organizations? This easy
I wanted to see just how easy it actually was to use SecureDrop, which I’d never done before. I enlisted ProPublica’s help: I told them I’d be sending them a document (a single-page PDF with “This is a test” on it), and asked them to confirm that they received it.
Obama Shows His True Colors as He Leaves Office
Commuting the sentence of Chelsea Manning, one of the great traitors of our time, is finger-in-the-eye willfulness. Obama took 28 years off the sentence of a soldier who stole and then released through WikiLeaks almost half a million military reports plus another quarter-million State Department documents.
.. The cables were embarrassing; the military secrets were almost certainly deadly. They jeopardized the lives not just of American soldiers on two active fronts — Iraq and Afghanistan — but of locals who were, at great peril, secretly aiding and abetting us. After Manning’s documents release, the Taliban “went on a killing spree”
.. Even the word “leaker” is misleading. Leak makes it sound like a piece of information a whistleblower gives Woodward and Bernstein to expose misdeeds in high office. This was nothing of the sort. It was the indiscriminate dumping of a mountain of national-security secrets certain to bring harm to American troops, allies, and interests.
.. What makes this commutation so spectacularly in-your-face is its hypocrisy. Here is a president who spent weeks banging the drums over the harm inflicted by WikiLeaks with its release of stolen materials and e-mails during the election campaign. He demanded a report immediately. He imposed sanctions on Russia. He preened about the sanctity of the American political process.
.. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. who went on to be a great Democratic senator, once argued passionately that in the anti-American, anti-democratic swamp of the U.N., America should act unwaveringly in opposition and never give in to the jackals. Obama joined the jackals. Why? To curry favor with the international Left? After all, Obama leaves office as a relatively young man of 55. His next chapter could very well be as a leader on the international stage, perhaps at the U.N. (secretary-general?) or some transnational (ostensibly) human-rights organization. What better demonstration of bona fides than a gratuitous attack on Israel?
.. A more likely explanation, however, is that these are acts not of calculation but of authenticity. This is Obama being Obama. He leaves office as he came in: a man of the Left, but possessing the intelligence and discipline to suppress his more radical instincts. As of November 9, 2016, suppression was no longer necessary.
.. We’ve just gotten a glimpse of his real self. From now on, we shall see much more of it.
If Donald Trump Targets Journalists, Thank Obama
Over the past eight years, the administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined.
It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.
Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.
.. the war on leaks and other efforts to control information was “the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate.”
.. Mr. Obama’s record of going after both journalists and their sources has set a dangerous precedent that Mr. Trump can easily exploit.
.. before the George W. Bush administration, only one person was ever convicted under the Espionage Act for leaking —
.. “You got the impression from the tone of the government officials that they wanted to take a zero-tolerance approach to leaks.”
.. the Obama administration won a ruling from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in my case that determined that there was no such thing as a “reporter’s privilege” — the right of journalists not to testify about their confidential sources in criminal cases.
.. That court ruling could result, for example, in a reporter’s being quickly jailed for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the Trump administration’s Justice Department to reveal the C.I.A. sources used for articles on the agency’s investigation into Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential election.