The Trump administration plans to hold a press conference next week in efforts to combat intelligence leaks, Attorney General Jeff Sessions indicated Thursday. “I have not been happy with the past prosecutions and investigations of criminal leaks,” Sessions told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson when asked about intelligence leaks.
“We’ve already taken a number of steps… We’ll have a press conference next week about it, but we already have multiples, numbers of prosecutions compared to last year at this time,” he said.
Sessions said his department would be “more aggressive” in pursuing prosecution, saying that “people need to go to jail”.
While President Donald Trump in the early months of his administration was slamming leaks that he said were emerging from the intelligence community, senior aides have in recent days been focusing on clamping down on politically damaging information emerging from within the White House itself.
Newly named White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci on Thursday publicly insinuated that chief of staff Reince Priebus was a leaker during an interview on CNN, the morning after he tagged Priebus in a since-deleted tweet saying he would contact the Justice Department and FBI “in light of the leak of my financial disclosure info which is a felony”.
The White House aide was referring to financial information revealed by a Politico reporter who said she obtained the disclosure form through a routine request to the Export-Import Bank, where Scaramucci worked before being named to his White House post.
As part of his announced plan to clamp down on alleged White House leakers, Scaramucci told The New Yorker in an explosive interview published Thursday that he wanted to “kill all of the leakers.”
“What I want to do is I want to f—— kill all the leakers, and I want to get the president’s agenda on track so we can succeed for the American people,” Scaramucci said.
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