Leaks—they used to be good, but now they are bad, the organization dedicated solely to publishing leaked private information declared this morning.
“The Obama admin/CIA is illegally funneling TOP SECRET//COMINT information to NBC for political reasons before PEOTUS even gets to read it,” the organization wrote this morning on Twitter.
It’s an interesting pivot for the website that published thousands of private emails for political reasons just this very summer, until you consider that those emails were disfavorable to Democrats, and this information is disfavorable to both Russia and Donald Trump.
The information in question concerns an in-depth NBC broadcast Thursday on Russian interference in the election, citing a top-secret report which was not delivered to Donald Trump until Friday. According to that report, Russia was deeply involved in the 2016 presidential election, hacking the DNC and spreading fake news with the dual intentions of helping Trump win and punishing President Obama for disrespecting Vladimir Putin.
“Highly classified intercepts illustrate Russian government planning and direction of a multifaceted campaign by Moscow to undermine the integrity of the American political system,” an anonymous intelligence official told NBC.
Trump was briefed on the report Friday, though you wouldn’t know it to read his statement, which concluded that maybe Russia could have been involved in some way, if you squint at it I guess. Still, it’s a silver lining—at least he’s taking the intelligence briefings now (though god only knows where he’s putting them.) And it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine more leaks like this on the horizon, given his penchant for tweeting about slashing our intelligence agencies’ budgets.