"That idea is always faintly nauseating. Leaks are an essential part of keeping American democracy functioning, but it’s also dangerous for law enforcement (or anyone else) to be able to railroad elected officials. Often the line between whistleblowing and political retaliation is thin or doesn’t exist at all. Felt’s motives may have been impure; then again, Nixon’s misdeeds were very serious and the public needed to know. More recently, leaks that revealed that then-National-Security Adviser Michael Flynn had lied to FBI agents were unprecedented; yet Flynn did lie, both to the vice president and the public. He has since pleaded guilty to lying and is cooperating with Mueller.
This isn’t how any of this is supposed to work. Everyone is misbehaving. A man who campaigned for president as the candidate of “law and order” is sprinting headlong into releasing a memo that the head of the FBI—Trump’s own hand-picked director—and the deputy attorney general, another Trump pick, believe could mislead the public and damage law enforcement. Meanwhile, there’s a real possibility that Trump’s attacks on the FBI and Justice Department have inspired retaliatory leaks, meaning that the president would have effectively elicited just the deep-state conspiracy against him that he alleged in the first place.
The White House’s assault on Justice and the FBI has long been premised on being able to an asymmetric war: Trump and his allies can make claims or even release the memo, but DOJ, bound by concerns about classified information, is hobbled from rebutting the memo. But many of the claims laid out by Trump champions make little or no sense."
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/trump-fbi/552062/
