I don't think it's two different things at all - a leak is a leak. How Obama treated them is irrelevant - Trump liked them when they caused problems for his opponent, and hates them now that they're causing problems for him.
What Wikileaks did was clearly illegal - breaking into email accounts to retrieve emails and making them public. One could argue that the ends justified the means - Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is a perfect example of that - but that doesn't change the fact that it's illegal.
The Trump administration leaks haven't crossed the boundary to illegal as far as I know; Trump claims they are illegal, but he makes up so much stuff it's hard to keep track of what is truth and what is fantasy. I don't think any classified information has been leaked - just stuff POTUS doesn't want the public to know because it could make him look bad. The whole Mike Flynn incident was incredibly mishandled. Pence came out looking like the real fool because he publically defended Flynn after Flynn lied to him about what he discussed with the Russian ambassador. Based on the timeline that has been developed due to these leaks, it's possible that Trump not only knew about it in advance but may have actually sanctioned it; Trump himself said that he "would have" directed Flynn to discuss the Obama sanctions. I think THAT warrants an investigation to determine what POTUS knew and when he knew it.
As far as whether Flynn broke any laws - he may have violated the Logan Act, but no one has been prosecuted under that act since it was passed in 1791. He did lie to the FBI, telling them initially that he didn't discuss the sanctions with the ambassador, but they decided not to follow up on that.
I disagree that "Deep Throat" was a whistleblower, only because whistleblowing tends to be a more public action. "Deep Throat" was quietly feeding Woodward and Bernstein information, where a whistleblower would have gone public and just laid it all out. |
