On Friday, President Donald Trump ordered an investigation into who leaked about security issues with his Qatari-gifted Air Force One. “Within 24 hours,” however, “the leak probe leaked,” and according to Miles Taylor — who himself acted as a whistleblower during the first Trump administration — this incident underscores the “incompetent” nature of the Trump administration as well as the danger it poses.
As Taylor explains, last week, “the New York Times reported something the White House desperately didn’t want Americans to know. The president’s shiny new jet (the $400 million palace-in-the-sky ‘donated’ by Qatar) isn’t actually safe. According to the paper’s sources, the plane lacks the defensive countermeasures custom-built for Air Force One, including the advanced antimissile systems that accompany the original plane. The leaks about the jet validate worries of national security commentators, myself included, who’ve warned that Trump’s scandal-plagued acceptance of a foreign jet would be riddled with security concerns.”
These leaks contradicted Trump’s asserted reasoning for bringing the old Air Force One to last week’s NATO summit in Turkey, and in the wake of the revelations, “officials described him as ‘livid,’ humiliated that the world had learned his prized gift is a flying vulnerability rather than a flying fortress.”
“So,” writes Taylor, “the president did what wannabe strongmen do. On Friday night, FBI Director Kash Patel was on the tarmac and about to depart for Chicago…when he was abruptly summoned to the White House. There, presumably at Trump’s direction, he oversaw the opening rounds of a leak probe into the New York Times journalists and whoever their sources were. Patel spent eight hours directing the probe from the White House, not FBI headquarters, a staggering departure from decades of practice meant to keep the bureau’s investigative machinery out of a president’s personal reach.”
This didn’t work out how the president hoped, however, as “within 24 hours, the newspaper that was the target of the FBI’s probe and Trump’s ire, the New York Times, published a detailed account of the entire operation. Sources were sharing details with them about Trump’s rage, Patel’s summons, the White House’s hands-on direction of the investigation, and the unusual nature of all of it. The details were attributed to ‘people with knowledge of the situation,’ which we can surmise are administration officials and/or people inside or close to the FBI. The leak probe leaked.”
According to Taylor, that a president would personally oversee an FBI probe into reporters who embarrassed him is “unprecedented,” but even more surprising is the fact that there are those in his orbit who are so ready to expose his misdeeds, almost as fast as he commits them. His administration is “too corrupt to hide it and too incompetent to cover it up.”
All of this comes, says Taylor, as a sign that “the censorship campaign itself is escalating to a dramatic new phase. Donald Trump’s personal involvement in these inquiries is an ominous sign for our democracy. And recent actions show that his media crackdown is more extensive than previously understood.” But, writes Taylor, the White House “keeps failing to account for” a critical consideration: “At every step, Americans are refusing to surrender in the censorship war. I’ve got to imagine that Trump is furious that his thuggery isn’t working, which is why he’s become more, well, thuggish.”
Taylor concludes with a dire warning, writing, “None of this is to make light of the fact that the president is waging an ominous war against the First Amendment. We should be clear-eyed. There are likely dimensions of this campaign we cannot yet see, including the quiet use of investigative and intelligence powers against reporters, sources, and critics in ways the Constitution expressly forbids. If you see a few ants on the table, there are hundreds underneath it or in the walls. The administration’s public actions against the media are a signal that there’s a flurry of activity behind the scenes.”