Leaks, Unnamed Sources in Far-Left Media Campaign to Destroy #PresidentTrump

From Michael Goodwin, at the New York Post:

"Separating fact from fake news has never been more essential," writes columnist @mgoodwin_nypost https://t.co/zIegHBFQP0

— New York Post (@nypost) March 5, 2017

Here a Russian story, there a Russian story, everywhere a Russian story — all based on leaks from anonymous sources. You don’t have to be a spook to spot the plan: Destroy Donald Trump by putting him in a bear hug.

To judge by their scattershot approach, the conspirators are fishing for a bombshell. The fallback goal is to inflict death by a thousand cuts.

Already they’ve gotten one scalp and part of another. Gen. Mike Flynn is gone, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions is wounded. Each made a mistake that obscured a larger truth: Somebody in the government has been spying on Trump’s team and giving top secret information to anti-Trump media outlets.

Our president is many things, but dumb he’s not. He recognized the stakes, so yesterday he struck back in a way that dramatically upped the ante in the war over his presidency.

Trump’s early-morning tweets accusing President Barack Obama of having wiretapped him at Trump Tower startled the world. It is a sensational claim, but in light of the tsunami of leaks from intelligence agencies, the president is right to suspect that he’s the target of a dirty game.

To start with, the unprecedented alliance against him clearly includes remnants of the Obama administration, and probably the former president himself. The recent New York Times report that Obama and his team dropped intelligence findings like bread crumbs so they would get wide readership and to prevent the Trump administration from burying them reveals an attempt to undermine if not subvert a legally elected president.

The Times report conveys suspicions that Trump would deep-six the findings if he could while giving a free pass to Obama’s leakers who may have committed crimes. The Times knows who in the Obama camp was involved and what they did. The paper has an ethical obligation to report it.

Yet here’s the rub: What exactly was in those findings? All the public knows is that intelligence officials said they investigated whether the Trump campaign had ties to Russia, and we only know that because it was leaked by anonymous sources.

But that knowledge, while sounding suspicious, raises more questions than it answers.

For example, did investigators looking at Trump’s campaign find anything substantive? The Times has said no but keeps suggesting the probes continue. Publicly, the FBI won’t confirm or deny anything and even Congress is frustrated by the bureau’s behavior.

Yet the fact that there are leaks reveals something important: The investigation involved monitoring phone calls and maybe computers and maybe physical surveillance...

Keep reading.

PREVIOUSLY: "#PresidentTrump Seeks Investigation Into Alleged Obama Administration Wiretapping."