KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:
Today, President Donald Trump is slamming news reports that say aides for his 2016 presidential campaign made repeated contact with Russian intelligence officials. That reporting by The New York Times comes after the resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who raised questions about his own contacts with Russia. At a news conference today, Trump had strong words for those in the administration and intelligence community who leaked that information to the press.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think it's very, very unfair what's happened to General Flynn, the way he was treated and the documents and papers that were illegally - I stress that - illegally leaked. Very, very unfair.
MCEVERS: With us now to talk about these leaks is NPR's national security editor Phil Ewing. Hi there.
PHIL EWING, BYLINE: Hi, Kelly.
MCEVERS: All right, so who are these leakers, and where did they come from?
EWING: Well, that's the beauty of it from their perspective. We don't know exactly who they are because they want us to know what they know without knowing exactly their motivations for getting the information out or exactly where in the government they may be working. The president has accused the intelligence community of putting out this information about the ties between his presidential campaign and Russia and these discussions between his former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, whom he talked about, and the Russian ambassador during the time of transition before Trump was actually inaugurated and his team took over the White House.
The phrase you'll hear people use is the deep state, these government officials sometimes derided as bureaucrats or paper pushers who live and work in Washington and aren't subject to the political changes in the way their senior leaders are. So there are executives and assistant secretaries and so forth confirmed by Congress, likely not those people, instead the ones who are further down who will be here through this administration they hope and into the next one.
MCEVERS: I mean, President Trump said it was, quote, "people trying to cover up for a terrible loss that the Democrats had under Hillary Clinton." I mean, is this a partisan thing?
EWING: So far there's been no indication of that in the reporting. Very little of this is about Clinton or Democrats in Congress, for example, trying to cover up for Clinton's loss or the problems that she may have had running her campaign. It's been very focused on what these leakers say is the intelligence and congressional investigations taking place into the Trump administration. We may see more of that from Democrats as they continue with their own inquiries, but so far it mostly has not been about Clinton in terms of the press reporting.
MCEVERS: Is this a normal level of leaking, or is this more leaking than we usually see?
EWING: Very little about the Trump phenomenon is normal...
MCEVERS: Right.
EWING: ...Including this amount of information that's been coming out in the press. Every administration struggles with leaks. Every administration comes into Washington and gets frustrated because in the case of people coming from outside, they've never dealt with the media climate this aggressive before with people...
MCEVERS: Right.
MCEVERS: ...Who are as well sourced as reporters, our colleagues are at these news organizations. The difference is Trump's scandal is unlike one that any president has ever faced, these allegations about the ties between his campaign and his top White House officials and a foreign government. Which could be what has raised the stakes for people inside the family, as it were, to try to get this information out into the open.
MCEVERS: Trump says these leaks are a criminal act. What exactly is illegal, and what could the administration do?
EWING: He's correct. Sharing information that's classified is a crime. And there was a lot of discussion about that actually during the presidential campaign because one of the big issues was how did then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton handle it while she was in her job and using a private email server? The Obama administration actually was very aggressive on this score. In its eight years, it prosecuted nine cases involving whistleblowers and leakers compared with only three by all previous administrations. That's according to a piece in The New York Times about this.
And if Trump wants to, and he wants to be aggressive as he goes forward and kind of gets clear of these immediate scandals, he can really go after these places. He has some support for doing that in Congress. The Republican Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunez says he thinks the real issue is leaks too, and he wants to see these people figured out if possible so they can stop this from happening again.
MCEVERS: That's NPR national security editor Phil Ewing. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.