WHITE HOUSE FEEDS BOGUS INFO TO FERRET OUT LEAKERS

White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, has told staffers he's slipped information to people in the White House to see whether they'd share the information with the media, Axios reported on Sunday, July 12, 2020.

Writing for Business Insider late on Monday, July 14, 2020, Rosie Perper said President Trump told Meadows that it was important to "find the leakers" in the administration, which has been plagued by a series of high-profile leaks. The push to identify White House media informants has put some staffers "on edge," Axios said, citing unnamed officials as saying Meadows had been "unusually vocal about his tactics."

"Meadows told me he was doing that," a former White House official told Axios. "I don't know if it ever worked." As Axios noted, Meadows said last month on Sen. Ted Cruz's podcast, "The Verdict," that he had tracked down and fired a federal employee who leaked a draft of Trump's executive order targeting social-media companies to The New York Times.

Axios added that Trump was particularly angry about two recent leaks, one revealing that US intelligence suspected Russia of placing bounties on US troops in Afghanistan and the other noting that he had been rushed to the White House bunker during recent Black Lives Matter protests. According to The Times, Trump has told officials he is determined to find and prosecute the person who leaked the story about his trip to the bunker. Trump publicly denied fleeing to the bunker for his protection and said he was there instead for "more for an inspection," adding that he was there only "for a tiny, short little period of time." Meadows is Trump's fourth chief of staff in less than four years, though his predecessors also worked in a White House with major leaks.