White House chief of staff Susie Wiles attends a signing ceremony of an order on women's health, spearheaded by first lady Melania Trump, at the White House in Washington, DC, US, October 19, 2026.
For a White House that says it finds political leaks to be toxic for the country as well as for itself, Donald Trump’s house cleaning of the West Wing is going to backfire bigly.
Trump and his inner circle have long indicated that they hate both sharing information that has the possibility of being contentious and the leaks to journalists or political opponents that fuel Washington politics.
It’s already emerging, though, that ousting his most trusted advisors and supporters among legislators, staff and funders, simply is going to seed the journalistic leak garden. While administrations often adjust Cabinet makeup after they reach midterms, the election this time turned so badly for Trump that insiders are headed for the exits themselves as well as being chased over blame for the outcome.
While the news has focused on replacement of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles by immigration hardliner Stephen Miller, other recent departures in the Justice Department, the Health Department and the Pentagon have exposed serious disagreement over Trump policy.
Calley Means, a key official in Health and Human Services, already is dealing a blow to the Make-America-Healthy-Again campaign, and the departures of U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quinones and Assistant Attorney General John Eisenberg, the department’s top national security official, are undercutting Trump’s ordered prosecution of Barack Obama intelligence figures over probing the Trump campaign’s Russia ties a decade ago. The resignation of Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon opens the door to incoming Democrats to demand a return to enforcement of civil rights. Patrick Davis resigned as head of the Office of Legislative Affairs, which handles the DOJ’s dealings with Congress.
That’s the kind of dissatisfaction that reporters know well how to exploit by offering ways for the disgruntled to share insider information about how Trump policy came into being.
With Miller in place, expect that anti-leak campaign to strength. Are we supposed to think that Trump hiring a wrestling producer as press secretary is a sign of wanting to answer the kind of questions posed by this overwhelming midterm election?
Arresting Journalists
Mediate and The Atlantic report that the White House and Justice are considering arresting journalists to force them to reveal the identities of leakers. Behind the idea is the new White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. Wiles reportedly had pushed back on such a plan while Miller endorsed it. Trump has been pressing Justice to pursue criminal cases against people who leak information to the media on “national security grounds.”
Courts generally have ruled on behalf of individual journalists and news outlets in most of these cases, citing First Amendment precedents and both the skimpiness of evidence and the inappropriateness of tactics that the government has pursued. Those have included sending subpoenas to relatives of reporters, lawsuits against news organizations for billions of dollars, and personal harassment, only to be overridden by judges.
Justice even apparently weighed including The New York Times as a conspirator in criminal charges filed against James B. Comey Jr., the former FBI director, in its decade-old prosecution of leaks about the start of the investigation of Russia ties to the Trump campaign, newly released court summaries show.
The Pentagon is forcing even military brass to undergo lie detector tests inadmissible in court. Miller apparently has “insisted that it wouldn’t take long for journalists to give up their sources,” an Atlantic source said.
Congressional Republicans have counted on “whistleblower” statutes to protect their inside sources when troublesome information about the Biden administration emerged.
For sure, the ouster of Wiles and appointment of an aggressive and often cruel Miller as chief White House advisor will spur more grievance within the already isolated West Wing and deliver more leakers and whistleblowers to public sourcing.
Defining the ‘Leak’
Sometimes the “leaks” aren’t even leaks.
Speaking at a campaign rally in Arizona, Trump stated that leakers—specifically those revealing military operation times—”should be shot” or imprisoned for life, calling them “the scum of the earth.” He pointed to a reported leak involving departure and arrival times for B-2 bomber operations targeting Iran, something that was publicly available information.
It’s a “leak” when the information embarrasses or discloses material that the White House wants kept under wraps, as in reports of suicide attempts from the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln after nine months of deployment in the Middle East without proper supplies, or even accurate reports about military casualties or damage to U.S. bases in the region.
It was not a “leak” when War/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth improperly distributed military attack information on a Signal chat that included a journalist who did not publish the information. It certainly is not a leak when Trump himself telephones reporters or shares information inappropriately with foreign dignitaries.
Justice has accelerated its criminal investigation into the leak of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs abortion decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The probe, led by U.S. Attorney in Washington Jeanine Pirro and prosecutor Carlton Davis, has issued grand jury subpoenas to individuals who worked at the high court.
Meanwhile, the White House has led other federal agencies in denying press passes for mainstream news outlets, ridiculed individual reporters — especially women – or simply refused to provide information to the media or to Congress, even when specified by law, as in the Epstein Files.
Team Trump, which is using the “national security” label to justify self-glorifying ballrooms and arches are now using the label to silence critics.
Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.
