- President Donald Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows is so determined to catch White House leakers that he has deliberately fed privileged information to suspected leakers in order to see if they'd pass it along to the media, Axios reported.
- According to Axios, Trump stressed to Meadows that it was important to "find the leakers" within his administration, which has been plagued by a series of high-profile leaks.
- The outlet added that Trump is particularly angry about the most recent leaks, which include intelligence pointing to Russian bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan, and reports that Trump was rushed to the White House bunker during recent Black Lives Matter protests.
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President Donald Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows has slipped information to suspected White House leakers in order to see if they would share the information with the media, Axios reported on Sunday.
According to Axios, Trump stressed to Meadows that it was important to "find the leakers" within his administration, which has been plagued by a series of high-profile leaks. This obsession with finding White House media informants has put some staffers "on edge," Axios said, adding that Meadows has been "unusually vocal about his tactics."
"Meadows told me he was doing that," a former White House official told Axios. "I don't know if it ever worked."
In June, Meadows said on Sen. Ted Cruz's podcast "The Verdict" that he had tracked down and fired a federal employee who leaked a draft of Trump's executive order preventing social media censorship to The New York Times.
Axios added that Trump is particularly angry about recent leaks, which include intelligence pointing to Russian bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan, and reports that he was rushed to the White House bunker during recent Black Lives Matter protests.
According to The New York Times, Trump has told officials that he is determined to find and prosecute the person who leaked the story about his bunker hideout. Trump publicly denied that he went to the bunker for his protection and instead said he was there for "more for an inspection" adding that he was only there "for a tiny, short little period of time."
Meadows is Trump's fourth chief of staff in less than four years, though his predecessors have also experienced major leaks during their tenures.
In 2018, an anonymous senior White House official wrote an opinion article in The New York Times describing a secret resistance against the president among his staff in the White House.
"Many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations," the author, who remains anonymous, wrote. "I would know. I am one of them."
The senior official went on to write a bombshell book about Trump's presidency titled "A Warning," which described Trump's late-night tweeting like finding your "elderly uncle running pantsless across the courtyard."
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