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       #Post#: 28242--------------------------------------------------
       Remember? Obama So Paranoid Over White House Leaks He Used Invas
       ive Procedure on Staffers
       By: BJ Date: September 10, 2018, 7:34 am
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       Apparently, the president being against leaks is now not only
       unpatriotic but a sign that he’s a paranoiac — at least, so long
       as Donald Trump is in the White House.
       Axios reported Thursday that because of the leaks — including
       ones which found their way into a Bob Woodward book and a New
       York Times Op-Ed — Trump had become an “increasingly
       conspiracy-minded president.”
       “He would basically be like, ‘We’ve gotta get rid of them.
       The snakes are everywhere but we’re getting rid of them,'” one
       source said.
       “Trump would often ask staff whom they thought could be trusted.
       He often asks the people who work for him what they think about
       their colleagues, which can be not only be uncomfortable but
       confusing to Trump: Rival staffers shoot at each other and Trump
       is left not knowing who to believe,” Axios reported.
       “When he was super frustrated about the leaks, he would rail
       about the ‘snakes’ in the White House,” a source said.
       “One day, after one of those meetings, he said, ‘Everything that
       just happened is going to leak. I don’t know any of those people
       in the room.’ … He was very paranoid about this.”
       Wow, horrifying. I wonder what would happen if anyone else did
       this. Say, Barack Obama.
       Because of course he did this, and of course the answer was
       “nothing.”
       Yet, the Obama administration prosecuted leakers and gave
       staffers lie detector tests, as the Washington Examiner reminds
       us. In fact, the whole thing had to be reported by the Committee
       to Protect Journalists, whose 2013 report received almost none
       of the kind of play that Trump’s “paranoia” is getting these
       days.
       “U.S. President Barack Obama came into office pledging open
       government, but he has fallen short of his promise. Journalists
       and transparency advocates say the White House curbs routine
       disclosure of information and deploys its own media to evade
       scrutiny by the press,” the report said. “Aggressive prosecution
       of leakers of classified information and broad electronic
       surveillance programs deter government sources from speaking to
       journalists.”
       “This is the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever
       covered,” said David E. Sanger, longtime chief Washington
       correspondent for The New York Times.
       The administration called its efforts against leaks the “Insider
       Threat Program” and implemented plenty of invasive methods to
       stop it.
       “The Insider Threat Program being implemented throughout the
       Obama administration to stop leaks — first detailed by the
       McClatchy newspapers’ Washington bureau in late June — has
       already ‘created internal surveillance, heightened a degree of
       paranoia in government and made people conscious of contacts
       with the public, advocates, and the press,’ said a prominent
       transparency advocate, Steven Aftergood, director of the
       Government Secrecy Project at the Federation of American
       Scientists in Washington,” the report said.
       This included lie detector tests.
       “The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, announced
       on June 25, 2012, his own internal steps to stem leaks,” the
       report said.
       “Employees of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies — including the
       CIA, NSA, FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency — would be asked
       during routine polygraph examinations whether they had disclosed
       any classified information to anyone. And the new inspector
       general for the Intelligence Community, with jurisdiction over
       all its agencies, would investigate leak cases that had not
       produced prosecutions by the Justice Department to determine
       what alternative action should be taken.”
       A contemporaneous article from USA Today said the report
       “portrays an administration gripped by strict policies about
       information flow and paranoid about leaks across all executive
       branch departments.”
       Yet today? Nothing.
       But the paranoid one is Donald Trump. Right.
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