Mark Meadows, Trump’s new chief of staff is on a mission to find leakers. Meadows is reportedly setting traps for specific White House staffers suspected of leaking in hopes of outing them.
Meadows have told several White House officials that he has been feeding specific nuggets of information to staffers suspected of leaking and wait to see if they pass the information to reporters, Axios reports. This tactic has caught one leaker so far for a minor leak.
He’s still unable to find the leaker(s) for two recent leaks—the Russian bounty story and the NYT story about Trump being rushed to a bunker while police and protesters clashed outside the White House.
Finding leakers is the one thing that has remained constant in this White House that has been in a persistent state of flux and they are failing at that too. Anonymous still remains at large months later even after the individual wrote a book offering shocking insider details about the Trump administration.
Presidential historian Chris Whipple told Axios, that “this is a level of paranoia that we never even saw in the Nixon White House.” Leakers are not unique to the Trump administration. Leaks have been driving presidents crazy for sometime. But Whipple said this current administration  is going about catching leakers the wrong way.
“One thing that effective chiefs of staff figure out is that the way you prevent leaks is not by tapping people’s phones or threatening to ruin them,” Whipple said. “The way you prevent leaks is by running an effective White House staff where voices are heard and people feel they have a stake in the process and there’s some integrity.”
