What Is a Leak?

Hadas Gold gives White House communication director Anthony Scaramucci some tips about leaks:

What is not a leak? A public disclosure form available to anyone who requests it, as my colleague Lorraine Woellert did on Tuesday, obtaining and publishing Scaramucci’s financial disclosure form which he was required to file when he joined the government last month. The information is publicly available to anyone who asks.

Another thing that’s not a leak, you yourself telling reporters that someone is going to be fired. On Tuesday Scaramucci told my colleague Tara Palmeri that Assistant Press Secretary Michael Short was going to be let go. But then he told other reporters that “the fact that you guys know about it before [Short] does really upsets me as a human being and as a Roman Catholic.”

What is a leak then? Well it could be what Scaramucci did with Lizza. Lizza said Scaramucci did not request the conversation be off-the-record or on-background but it’s clear that he thought it was at least somewhat private because he tweeted last night “I made a mistake in trusting a reporter. It won’t happen again.” Some people have suggested that Scaramucci, being new to Washington and politics, wasn’t aware of the norms. But even if he did think he was talking privately, he initiated a phone call with someone he knew to be a reporter during which he was talking about internal feuds, trashing his colleagues, his own conversations with the president and that Priebus would be forced to resign soon. That is leaking.