I want to put this out here right off the bat: While I am an experienced journalist who believes fully in the First Amendment’s freedom of the press protections, my advanced education is in political science and national security, so take what I am about to write in that context.

First, the Trump administration needs to identify who is leaking top-secret signals intelligence information to the media, arrest them and put them on trial for violations of the Espionage Act of 1917 and provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.

But that’s not all: The administration also needs to charge every single journalist who has received, and then published, that leaked SIGINT, because doing so is a blatant violation of the law as well.

Under 18 § 798 of the U.S. Code:

Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates … or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes … any classified information … obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

Some journalists who have pointed this out – including Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, have nonetheless justified the act of leaking such sensitive data and the subsequent publishing of said data, as some sort of noble endeavor, all because they think there have been violations of law that the public should know about.

Frankly, it isn’t noble. It’s criminal, and just because you don’t like the person in the White House doesn’t give you some sort of mandate to violate very serious, and very necessary, statutes protecting classified information. (RELATED: Read how the New York Times has committed treason at NaturalNews.com)

Imagine if some careerist spook inside the intelligence establishment during World War II thought President Roosevelt’s plan to invade Europe was wrong, so he/she leaked details of D-Day to a friendly reporter in the Washington media. Would that have been alright? Of course not. So it’s not okay now.

What is happening to the Trump administration is an outright rebellion by the intelligence and foreign policy bureaucracy, the “deep state” shadow government you’ve heard about but never really believed existed. It does exist, and its operatives have launched an all-out assault on this White House. In fact, their first victim is President Donald Trump’s now-former national security advisor, Mike Flynn.

Flynn, a retired three-star Army general and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was about to disclose secrets related to former President Obama’s shady “nuclear deal” with Iran – and for that, this reformer was broadsided, part of a months-long operation by former Obama administration National Security Council figure Ben Rhodes and other deep operatives.

“The Obama administration knew that Flynn was going to release the secret documents around the Iran deal, which would blow up their myth that it was a good deal that rolled back Iran,” a source told the Washington Free Beacon. “So in December the Obama NSC started going to work with their favorite reporters, selectively leaking damaging and incomplete information about Flynn.”

Those leaks continued even after Flynn announced his retirement. For instance, a Wednesday story in The New York Times divulged intimate details about alleged conversations that people close to Trump may have had with Russian officials, some of whom could have been Russian intelligence. While there is just enough information in the story to feed the deep state’s well-established (but unproven) narrative that Russia helped Trump win the election, there is no real proof that anything the Times story reported is even valid. In fact, at one point, the Times reported, the four current and former American officials that fed the paper the information “had seen no evidence” of any cooperation between Moscow and Team Trump.

The point is, the deep state has chosen sides – the side of the globalist establishment to which Trump does not belong and which he pledged throughout his campaign to dissolve (“drain the swamp”). Which means these operatives have not chosen the side of the American people – including citizens who oppose Trump and are gleeful that he’s being treated this way.

If you’re one of those people, remember how unfair you thought it was when Hillary Clinton was the subject of leaks. That wasn’t “the Russians” – those leaks came from operatives of the same deep state who have competing interests with those now aligned against Trump. (RELATED: Find out what Russia has said about U.S. charges of interfering in the election at NationalSecurity.news)

It’s utter madness, it is undermining our democratic republic, and it has the capability of bringing the whole government down if the president doesn’t stand up to it and put a stop to it.

He’ll be opposed at every turn. He’ll be lied about. He’ll be pilloried in the media. He’ll be made to look impotent, foolish, unhinged. He may even be threatened – directly or indirectly – along with his family. The deep state will do anything to hold onto its power.

It will take a strong president, a very close, trustworthy advisory team, and a lot of guts to start identifying and charging the deep state leakers and the media types who illegally receive, and then illegally divulge, sensitive intelligence.

But for the survival of the republic, it’s got to be done.

J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.

Sources:

NYTimes.com

FreeBeacon.com

TheNationalSentinel.com

NewsTarget.com