Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” Glenn Greenwald said Democrats who “suddenly love leaks” about President Donald Trump’s administration thought people who leaked to the media during the Obama administration were “villains,” “traitors,” and “they ought to go to prison.”
Greenwald said, “The problem is if you look at the last eight years, there has been a very concerted war on not just sources and whistleblowers, but also journalists, implemented by not Donald Trump but by the Obama administration. More sources prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act than in all previous administrations combined. Journalists such as James Rosen at Fox News and Jim Risen at The New York Times and those of us who worked on the Snowden reporting constantly threatened with prosecution or having our phone records subpoenaed and the like.”
“And Democratic officeholders in D.C. were virtually unanimous in the idea that people who leak information that’s classified are villains, they’re traitors, they ought to go to prison,” he continued. “This framework has been created both rhetorical and legal over the last eight years that says that people who leak classified information regardless of how important that information is ought to be punished. That’s the rhetoric and framework that Donald Trump is seizing on. And it the reason it’s been so damaging to have watched Democrats who suddenly love leaks now that it’s helping them have wage such an aggressive war on journalism and investigate reporting over the last eight years.”
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