Leakers Mess With the Trump Investigation

[EC]

I wrote last week about the ethics of leaking. I did not imagine that I would be returning to the topic so soon. The raft of stories telling us that President Donald Trump faces investigation for possible obstruction of justice, though, requires that I revisit the theme. The commentariat is all agog over the news. But I’m concerned about the news behind the news.

Yes, I am deeply troubled at the possibility that the president of the United States may have committed a crime. Still, people were already choosing up sides on that one before the latest leak, and I doubt that anyone’s mind is going to change soon. A presidential obstruction of justice would constitute a serious challenge to both the rule of law and the proper functioning of democracy. But this column is not about that doleful thought. It’s about a different threat to democracy: the fact that the leak occurred at all. That fact, except among partisans, does not seem to me to be eliciting sufficient outrage.

In my earlier column, I argued that leakers are essentially liars. They want the benefit of being trusted with confidences without suffering the cost of keeping what they know to themselves. They sit in meetings and review documents and implicitly promise to keep the secrets, but their actual plan is to decide for themselves which juicy nugget to share with others. In philosophical terms, the leaker always does a moral wrong to the person who entrusted him with the secret.

More: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-15/leakers-mess-with-mueller-s-investigation-of-trump

[EC]

It's no coincidence that confide and confidence share the same root word.

[Smokin Joe]

LIARS? In Washington D.C.?

I'm shocked. It's honest folks who are on the short list.

But that doesn't make the multitude any less despicable.

I know a man when I was a kid. He had no eyebrows, no eyelashes, no hair (as far as any of us knew) at all. The most anyone reportedly got out of him was that he lost that hair somehow in the service. All he told  us was that he was not at liberty to say, and he took the secret to his grave.

People sworn to secrecy used to treat a secret thus. Not give it five days, or five years, or even fifty, but just not tell, period, unless they were told it was okay to say something.  Any more, they can't tweet it out fast enough.