Official leaks
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Official leaks is John Kiriakou's term for the disclosures that flow continuously out of the executive branch and are never charged. Asked in 2017 whether politicians and the White House leak, he answers that they are the main source of it: "that's the dirty little secret of Washington, isn't it? The most prolific leaker in Washington is the president of the United States. Not even just that, it's Donald Trump; it was Barack Obama before him."

He puts the bulk of the traffic in three buildings: "many leaks, I might even say most leaks, come out of the White House, out of the National Security Council and out of the Defense Department. Now those are usually what we call official leaks, where they're meant as trial balloons or they're meant to influence public opinion or public policy. Those leaks are never prosecuted."

Why the crackdowns produce so little

On Jeff Sessions's announcement of an administration-wide crackdown and a new FBI leaks unit, Kiriakou's first reading is about the press rather than the leakers: "this is really not about leaks as much as it is about controlling the press. It's the press that the president has a problem with."

His second is procedural, and predicts failure. "The intelligence community, the intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense can refer as many leaks as they want to the FBI. It's the FBI that's going to decide if they're even worth investigating, and even if they are worth investigating they're still going to have to try to figure out whether or not it's worth filing charges. So it doesn't really matter how many new leaks are referred to the Justice Department for investigation, I think we're going to see very few actual cases, if any at all."

And on whether the policy was new at all: "frankly, not much. This really isn't so much of a new policy as it is an extension of the Obama administration's policy. It was Attorney General Eric Holder that really declared war on leaks back in 2009", the administration that "prosecuted nearly three times as many leak cases as all previous administrations combined."

See also

- Leaking versus whistleblowing
- Over-classification
- Eric Holder
- Espionage Act
