Noah Feldman, Columnist

War on Leakers Is Off to a Bad Start for Trump

Prosecuting the release of an NSA document on Russian hacking will only raise more questions.

June 6, 2017 at 5:06 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Off to battle.
Photographer: T.J. Kirkpatrick/Bloomberg

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The prosecution of intelligence contractor Reality Leigh Winner under the Espionage Act is a sure sign that the Trump administration’s war on leakers has begun. But as the opening battle, it’s poorly chosen, and a serious mistake in prosecutorial discretion by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who should know better. Winner has the wrong profile -- and the leak is very much on the wrong subject -- for a headline-grabbing prosecution by an administration in which the president is already the leaker in chief.

The only good news for the Justice Department is that, if the evidence pans out the way it’s been reported, they have Winner dead to rights. The National Security Agency document she is accused of printing and sending to the Intercept is classified, and passing it along was a felony. Barack Obama’s administration also aggressively prosecuted leakers, so ideally, the critique of the Winner prosecution shouldn’t be partisan.