White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Scaramucci’s Vain Quest to Stop the Leaks

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There’s a new sheriff in town. He has strapped on his shooting irons and has been hunting down varmints — varmints right in the ranch house.

The sheriff is Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director, and the varmints are the “leakers.” Watch out!

Scaramucci has threatened to fire people. He says he may be contacting the FBI and the Justice Department. He has also hinted that the leakers are high officials who are using juniors to contact the press.

This is a strange interpretation of “communications.”

The White House is leaking because it isn’t talking coherently. The Trump administration is not rooted in policy or philosophy, and the White House staff is divided against itself; a deeply unhappy place wanting in direction and internal clarity.

So, it leaks. It leaks for personal reasons. It leaks for patriotic reasons. It leaks out of frustration. And it leaks because no one is in charge administratively: too many assistants — including Scaramucci — are reporting directly to the president, eschewing the line of command that normally flows through the chief of staff and the national security adviser. With Scaramucci on the loose, Reince Priebus is chief of staff in title only: a male nipple.

The communications failure is enormous and extends down to the inability of the press office to answer simple questions, like who was playing golf with the president? One wouldn’t assume this to be a state secret, but reporters ask and get no answer. They aren’t rebuffed, they’re just not answered.

In this instance, a question not answered is a revelation of another sort: the communications staff members are willfully kept in the dark. It isn’t claimed that state secrets and initiatives are being discussed on the greens. It’s a simple matter of the president’s recreation. Is Trump ashamed of the company he keeps?

The avalanche of leaks are cries for clarity in a chaotic administration. They are the symptoms, not the disease.

The leaks may just get worse. But the mechanics or leaking will get more inventive as Scaramucci ferrets around, suspecting his colleagues who will live in increasing fear.

Leaking is as old a journalism and was going on long before the invention of movable type. Journalists regard it with equanimity, as part of the trade, an integral part of the job — also as part of their right to collect the news, and the public’s right to know.

However, leaking does have large consequences when it comes to how the government makes decisions. The anti-leakers have a point here: Nowadays, ideas can’t be batted about inside government with abandon. Particularly, they can’t be committed to writing without the fear of them getting into the press.

Leaking classified information is criminal. WikiLeaks troubled many journalists; delicate choices in a democracy.

But that’s not what Scaramucci is fishing for; he wants to end the embarrassment of the president.

For those who keep secrets, technology has made the job a thousand times harder. When I was a young reporter, a congressman or White House staffer wishing to show you some document — to leak it — either had to tell you what it said or allow you to see and copy it by hand. This was risky, as only a few hands would’ve had access to the document or letter.

The Xerox machine changed that instantly, and the arrival of the digital age put a leak a keystroke away. Privacy and secrecy aren’t what they used to be.

But the hunt-and-kill mission Scaramucci is on won’t stop this White House — this seething hive of fear and ambition, this policy free for all, this scarcely controlled chaos, this gyre of half-formed purposes — from leaking.

With Sheriff Scaramucci nosing around, casting doubt on everyone, the leaking might accelerate but will be more devious: Tell a junior to tell friend to tell a reporter, rather than telling the reporter something directly. Email and telephones will be eschewed, or used with great care.

If the communications director wants to control leaking, he should try communicating. He shouldn’t send the press secretary out there looking like a pudding before the custard is poured over it, without her knowing what the president’s policies are or what he meant by his latest enigmatic tweet.

Sheriff, calm the chaos, and start communicating. Then, pardner, the leaks will dry up like them thar desert.

 

For InsideSources

Photo:  White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci speaks to members of the media outside the White House in Washington, Tuesday, July 25, 2017. AP PHOTO/PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS

 

WikiLeaks and Journalism Lore

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“Publish and be damned,” the Duke of Wellington told the courtesan Harriette Wilson, who threatened to publish her memoirs and the general’s love letters in 1825.

In challenging Wilson, Wellington gave publishers and journalists a rallying cry that has echoed down through the years.

The irony here is that “The Iron Duke” despised anything that suggested opening up to the people: Indeed, he may have been history’s greatest elitist. He is not likely to have endorsed the dumping of hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic dispatches by WikiLeaks. As for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Wellington would have had him shot or maybe hanged for better effect.

Yet Wellington gave us the famous phrase and, by and large, it has been a serviceable rule for journalism.

Publications that have sought to censor themselves—sometimes out of fear and sometimes for political reasons–have paid a high price. In 1963, the Profumo affair nearly brought down the Conservative government in Britain. But The Sunday Mirror, which had learned that war minister John Profumo was sharing the favors of party girl Christine Keeler with the Soviet naval attaché and a few others to boot, did not publish for fear of libel.

In the end the scandal leaked out in the United States, and the newspaper was left looking very foolish. I know because I was working at The Sunday Mirror.

A few decades later, Newsweek sat on the Monica Lewinsky–Bill Clinton scandal and inadvertently boosted the fortunes of Matt Drudge.

It is easier to say “publish and be damned” about a sex scandal involving public figures than it is about national and international security, which is orders of magnitude more difficult.

Is WikiLeaks doing a public service in posting hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic dispatches on the Web and hand-feeding them to five major news outlets, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, El Pais and Der Spiegel? Or is Assange indulging in a grand act of anti-Americanism; or an equally grand act of anarchy, using technology in furtherance of the petulance of one man and his small band of accomplices?

The measurable good is slight. It may be confined to improved computer security, itself lamentable.

The evil is ongoing and will take years to assess. The first casualty will be in the quality of information sent back from the field to Washington: It will be sanitized, bowdlerized and neutered. The free exchange of ideas and information is compromised. The integrity of diplomatic communications cannot be taken for granted in future.

Then there are those, uncountable, whose careers have been ended because they were friends of the United States; not spies, just friends.

During the first tranche of leaks, I was the guest of the U.S. ambassador in a small country. Although there was nothing incriminating released, our diplomats suffered acute embarrassment and wondered how difficult their jobs would be in the future.

The gravest category is where vicious regimes are exploiting the WikiLeaks information to punish their political enemies: Step forward Robert Mugabe, the savage and ruthless dictator in Zimbabwe who has trashed what was once the jewel of Africa. He has seized on meetings his political rival Morgan Tsvangira held with Western diplomats, seeking to save the people of Zimbabwe from the predations of Mugabe and his band of thugs.

“Treason”cries Mugabe, who is as promiscuous in accusing his enemies of treason as was Henry VIII.

Relying on a law from the colonial days, Mugabe has appointed a commission to rule on whether Tsvangirai should face trial for treason. He has also picked out negative comments about Tsvangirai from various American dispatches to vilify his political rival.

Assange knew exactly what he was doing because he provided early access to his data dump to the five most reputable news organizations he knew. Clearly he hoped they would treat the material gingerly, as they have.

In so doing Assange must have hoped to mitigate the really serious damage–including executions–that might result from his mischief. He was hoping they would save him from the damnation of his own publishing.