While I agree with the overall thrust of Jonathan Tobin’s remarks regarding selective leaks from the U.S. Intelligence community of classified information, with the intent of undermining President Trump, I think Jonathan has missed the mark when he comments that:
Those who point out Trump’s hypocritical response to the leaks are not wrong. On the stump during the campaign, he was positively gleeful in describing the e-mails written by John Podesta and DNC officials and published by WikiLeaks. But liberals have engaged in the same hypocrisy, screaming bloody murder about WikiLeaks while touting each new anonymously sourced revelation about the Trump administration.
I submit there’s a big difference – a yuuuge difference, even – between a candidate being pleased his opponents were lazy or negligent enough to not secure their private, but unclassified, emails, and deliberate leaks of classified government secrets by people sworn to keep this information secure. Russia, which allegedly got into DNC email accounts, is like a force of nature: If it can steal sensitive U.S. information, it will, and it’s incumbent on the political parties to protect private information they think might be embarrassing. Candidate Donald Trump had every reason to be happy the Democrats fell short in this regard and that, despite efforts by the mainstream press to ignore the emails, the public got more insight into the true nature of Hillary Clinton and her campaign. This was on par with NBC’s release of a hot mic recording of Donald Trump that he never knew existed.
The current situation, by contrast, involves federal employees breaking the law, their oaths, and betraying the public trust by leaking classified information. This is sedition, not lax private email security, and the president is right to be incensed by it. Yet those who were outraged at the mere thought of the Russians releasing private emails now cheer Americans doing much worse. There is indeed hypocrisy here, but it’s not coming from the White House.