President Donald Trump suggested Wednesday that government whistleblowers who leak confidential information to the news media should face execution, escalating his rhetoric against national security disclosures as the midterm elections approach.
Speaking to a crowd of supporters at a campaign rally in Bullhead City, Arizona, Trump targeted recent disclosures concerning incompetent military operations in Iran, accusing anonymous sources of undermining national security and putting his administration’s political fate at risk.
“In my opinion, leakers should be shot,” Trump told the crowd. “In the old days, we used to shoot leakers, you know, when they leak what time you’re going to attack a country.”
Using Trump’s logic, among those who would have been executed were Army private Chelsea Manning, NSA contractor Edward Snowden, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, associate FBI director Mark Felt, Continental Navy midshipmen Benjamin Enebuske and Richard Marven— but that conflicts with the truth about American history.
Notwithstanding the falsehood of his premise, Trump continued his critique, characterizing leakers in harsh terms.
“Somebody leaked, some sleazebag,” Trump said. “They ought to go to jail and be shot for the rest of their life. They should be in jail. Leakers should be — in my opinion, leakers should be shot. They’re real to me. They’re the scum of the Earth!”
Trump was referencing media reports following Operation Midnight Hammer, a U.S. military strike in June 2025 targeting Iranian nuclear facilities during a 12-day conflict between Israel and Iran.
Following the strike, several news outlets published findings from a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency report indicating that Iranian forces had moved portions of their enriched uranium before the attack, and that structural damage to the facilities was less severe than initial administration assessments claimed.
Trump falsely alleged that news organizations, including The New York Times and CNN, published operational departure schedules that forced military planners to delay the strikes, despite the fact that no news stories disclosing departure or strike times were published prior to the execution of the mission.
The whistleblowers did reveal that Trump was lying when he told journalists and the public that the strikes were a “spectacular success” and “monumental damage” was achieved.
The remarks triggered immediate pushback from media commentators and transparency advocates. Jen Psaki, a host on MS NOW and former White House press secretary, called on political candidates across parties to state publicly whether they support such measures.
“Every Republican candidate should be asked between now and November: Do you agree with Donald Trump that leakers should be shot?” said Psaki. “Everybody should be asked that question. Do you agree with Donald Trump that the U.S. government should shoot anyone who leaks information to the media?”
Under U.S. federal law, unauthorized disclosures of classified material are prosecuted under statutes including the Espionage Act. Penalties include security clearance revocations, monetary fines, and prison sentences. The Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution guarantee due process and prohibit summary execution.
As the November 3, 2026, midterm elections approach, Trump has created acute anxiety within the Republican Party, with GOP strategists and lawmakers expressing concern that his standing is dragging down congressional candidates.
High gas, diesel, and grocery prices, a slow economy, and rising living costs are leading to public anger over Trump’s policies, while frustration surrounding the unprovoked and illegal war against Iran have hurt Republican candidates in both swing and traditionally safe areas.
Historical Whistleblowing and Leaks in the U.S.
Efforts by government employees and service members to expose corruption, government misstatements, or illegal actions have played a central role throughout American history, routinely sparking debate over the balance between national security and public transparency.
The U.S. has protected whistleblowers since the Continental Congress, recognizing that American citizens benefit from laws that protect against employer retaliation, safeguard confidentiality, and offer substantial rewards for exposing fraud.
Across nearly two and a half centuries, from the Revolutionary War to the digital age, men and women inside the federal government have faced a recurring dilemma: whether loyalty to their country requires upholding government secrecy or breaking it to expose official wrongdoing.
Efforts by civil servants, military officers and intelligence contractors to report corruption, official falsehoods or unconstitutional actions have routinely reshaped American politics. While government officials consistently argue that unauthorized disclosures jeopardize national security and ongoing operations, transparency advocates emphasize that whistleblowers have served as essential checks on executive power.
From Revolutionary Roots to the Cold War
The American tradition of protecting whistleblowers originated during the Revolutionary War. In 1777, 10 Continental Navy officers, led by midshipmen Benjamin Enebuske and Richard Marven, reported Commodore Esek Hopkins for corruption and the abuse of British prisoners of war about six months after the Declaration of Independence.
After Hopkins filed criminal libel charges against the officers, the Continental Congress stepped in, voting to pay for their legal defense and enacting the nation’s first whistleblower protection resolution on July 30, 1778.
The law declared it the duty of all persons in the service of the United States “to give the earliest information to Congress or any other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors.”
Nearly two centuries later, during the height of the Vietnam War, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the “Pentagon Papers” to news outlets in 1971.
The top-secret 7,000-page Department of Defense study revealed that successive presidential administrations had systematically misled Congress and the American public regarding the scope and status of U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia.
Ellsberg was indicted under the Espionage Act of 1917, facing up to 115 years in prison. However, in 1973, a federal judge dismissed all charges after revelations surfaced that the Nixon administration had engaged in illegal wiretaps and burglarized Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in an effort to discredit him.
Watergate and the Digital Era
The Nixon era produced another pivotal disclosure in 1972, when Mark Felt, the associate director of the FBI, secretly provided information to reporters at The Washington Post.
Operating under the pseudonym “Deep Throat,” Felt confirmed that the White House was actively involved in the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up.
Felt maintained anonymity for more than three decades before revealing his identity in 2005. His leaks provided critical leads that guided congressional investigations, ultimately leading to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.
The nature of government disclosures shifted dramatically with the advent of mass digital storage in the 21st century:
- 2010 — Chelsea Manning: A U.S. Army intelligence analyst disclosed hundreds of thousands of classified military records and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, bringing to light unrecorded civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Manning was convicted by court-martial under the Espionage Act and sentenced to 35 years in prison. President Barack Obama commuted her remaining sentence in 2017.
- 2012 — John Kiriakou: The former CIA officer was sentenced to prison after disclosing classified details regarding the agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, and revealing the identity of a covert officer to journalists.
- 2013 — Edward Snowden: A former contractor for the National Security Agency revealed classified documents exposing global mass surveillance initiatives. The disclosures included the bulk collection of domestic telecommunications metadata under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act. Charged under the Espionage Act, Snowden fled the United States and received asylum in Russia. His disclosures sparked federal court rulings declaring the metadata collection unlawful and prompted Congress to pass the USA FREEDOM Act of 2015 to restrict mass surveillance.
Although some leakers face severe penalties, none have been executed or sentenced to life imprisonment.
Former senior Treasury official Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards was sentenced to six months in federal prison and former IRS Criminal Investigation Division analyst John C. Fry was sentenced to five years of probation and ordered to pay a $5,000 for leaking suspicious activity and financial reports involving political figures.
In 2019, former Senate Intelligence Committee security director James Wolfe was sentenced for lying to the FBI about his undisclosed contacts with journalists.
“A whistleblower acts on the purest of motives, telling the truth and committing a fair and honorable deed that must be followed through because the whistleblower acts with a moral compass,” Jane Turner, a highly decorated 25-year veteran Special Agent who changed the FBI forever by exposing how the agency failed to investigate and misclassified child sex abuse and rapes on North Dakota Indian Reservations. “On the other hand, the government seeks to protect a system that allows them to play by their own changing rules, on their own changing landscape.”
Balancing Secrecy and Democracy
The debate surrounding these disclosures highlights a fundamental tension within the American system of governance.
Officials across presidential administrations maintain that unauthorized leaks breach oaths of office, damage diplomatic relationships and compromise military readiness. Press freedom groups and civil liberties organizations counter that without internal disclosures, systemic abuses, illegal surveillance and war crimes would remain hidden from the public eye.
As lawmakers and courts continue to refine statutory protections for federal employees, the historical record demonstrates that whistleblowers remain a powerful, albeit controversial, mechanism for institutional accountability in the United States.
While government officials consistently argue that unauthorized disclosures jeopardize ongoing intelligence operations and foreign relations, press freedom groups emphasize that leakers and whistleblowers have historically exposed official wrongdoing, protected constitutional rights, and informed public debate.
Hostility not limited to security leaks
The Trump administration is also scaling back legal pathways for citizens to expose government corruption by expanding the Department of Justice’s authority to dismiss qui tam lawsuits and mandating tighter limits on reporting fraud under the False Claims Act.
Whistleblower advocates warn that these policy shifts erect steep bureaucratic barriers, effectively chilling potential whistleblowers from coming forward to reveal widespread fraud and corporate malfeasance out of fear their cases will be summarily shut down.
Whistleblowers filing qui tam lawsuits under the False Claims Act (FCA) have successfully recovered more than $60 billion for the federal government, a massive figure that accounts for the vast majority of the over $85 billion in total FCA recoveries achieved since Congress substantially strengthened the law in 1986.
From 2007 to 2020, the IRS Whistleblower Rewards Program alone led to the collection of over $5.9 billion and gave out over $1 billion in awards. The program revealed how incentives for whistleblowers can have a powerful detection and deterrence effect on financial crime.
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