State Department Leakers Undermine Diplomacy
Major media outlets — including the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, and Reuters — have increasingly relied on leaked sensitive State Department documents to generate foreign policy “news.” All administrations must deal with unauthorized disclosures, and it is hardly a headline story that leakers are alive and well inside State. Nor is it surprising that the State Department’s entrenched bureaucracy is particularly hostile to Trump administration initiatives in areas such as immigration and deportation, foreign assistance, and transatlantic relations. (RELATED: The Return of Realism in American Foreign Policy)
The Trump team at State faces more than the usual internal bureaucratic resistance because it is both remaking foreign policy priorities and retooling America’s national security machinery. In his first year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has made good progress in selecting career diplomats for leadership positions who will faithfully implement administration policies. But the State Department’s vast global footprint — from Washington to far-flung embassies — means that leaks persist and the need for more accountability and vetting remains. (RELATED: The Son of Cuba Takes on the Last Communist Neighbor)
The unauthorized disclosure is the tool that senior diplomats undertake to undermine a policy they oppose. For example, the New York Times cited “confidential State Department correspondence and a funding memo” to portray negotiations with Cameroon as a “secret deal” to “pressure” that country into accepting “covertly” deported migrants. The leak in this matter was almost surely unlawful and clearly intended to manufacture a public controversy to discredit State’s deportation diplomacy. Unsurprisingly, the reporting overwhelmingly emphasized the putative rights of the illegal migrants; the journalists were singularly uncurious if these particular deportees might include heinous criminals unlawfully in the U.S. Nor did the journalists bother to mention that deportation was at the heart of candidate Donald Trump’s electoral mandate. (RELATED: Mirrors Instead of Windows: America’s Failed Foreign Policy Perspective)
Similarly, Reuters has published a steady stream of news articles on U.S. diplomatic efforts to implement White House immigration restrictions and visa policies, typically sourced to “internal State Department cables.” These cables did not enter the public domain by accident. Reuters foreign policy correspondent Humeyra Pamuk received these cables and, in 2025, wrote many articles based on them. Under the State Department’s internal classification system, the leaked cables were almost certainly marked as either “sensitive but unclassified” or “confidential.”
Career department leaders — not just administration political appointees — need to call out this misconduct directly.
While most career diplomats — even those who hold President Trump in low regard — condemn such leaks, the leaders of the profession have been reluctant to confront the scale of the problem openly. They fail to recognize that continuing unauthorized disclosures constitute the most serious professional shortcoming inside the State Department. Career department leaders — not just administration political appointees — need to call out this misconduct directly. The behavior of the bad apples, even in absentia, should be aggressively shamed by career colleagues in the halls of Foggy Bottom.
Enforcement is difficult for State’s Diplomatic Security agents, whose mission is to protect classified information. Almost all U.S. diplomats hold security clearances. A determined leaker can access classified material, print and remove documents, and anonymously transmit images to journalists. Perhaps the most dastardly is the scoundrel official, usually a very senior career diplomat, who speaks “anonymously” to the media to clandestinely pass on the essence of a high-level classified discussion.
State’s press office should warn those journalists who traffic in unauthorized disclosures that, in so doing, they are endangering their continued access to press briefings and department media events. There are many such journalists who mistakenly believe their right to publish supersedes any other public interest.
Politico’s State Department reporter, Nahal Toosi, is another journalist with Foggy Bottom sources who feed her stolen documents. Ms. Toosi’s April 17 “exclusive” column on the impact of the ongoing Iran conflict on the Muslim world was based on a batch of State Department cables that were certainly classified as “confidential.” Their release to her was almost certainly a criminal act.
Beyond denying reporters access, Secretary Rubio cannot do much to fix the one-sided journalism, but he can do something about the department he runs. For that reason, when he started as secretary a year ago, Rubio replaced many senior career diplomats whom Tony Blinken left in position to run Foggy Bottom. Rubio recruited career officers whom he could trust to implement in good faith the president’s agenda. He found many, but as the leak incidents demonstrate, not enough.
Leaders of organizations like the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), which claims to represent career U.S. diplomats, chafed at Rubio’s bold approach. In protest, AFSA proclaimed that all career officials at State, of course, could be expected to carry out their orders, even when it came to implementing Trump’s objectives. Any other behavior was considered “inconceivable.” One former AFSA president wrote:
We may offer alternatives to current policy, internally and including use of the Dissent Channel… But once we offer this advice, and whether or not it is taken, we implement the administration’s policy. If we cannot do that, then the next step is resignation.
Not so fast: the leak cases are proof that for some, the next step is not resigning but leaking — to sabotage that policy. These leaks are not an example, by any stretch of the legal imagination, of cases of whistleblowing, which never justifies leaking. Employees have an established internal process for whistleblowing. Making unauthorized disclosures is clear disobedience, often designed to derail an administration’s diplomatic priority or signature issue, like immigration restrictions, that millions of Americans voted for and expect their government to carry out.
For many who proudly serve in the career ranks, these seedy episodes are inexcusable behavior that discredits the professionalism of the U.S. diplomatic service. It further shreds the principle, which is very much being tested, that all State Department officials, even those who may cast a ballot in the voting booth against a president, can still be trusted to implement his policies. Yes, some certainly can, and they do honorably conduct themselves, but these unauthorized disclosures illustrate that too many do not merit that trust.
The establishment foreign policy community that has so vociferously condemned the Trump administration for not naming enough career ambassadors should reflect on the torrent of ongoing leaks. They give Secretary Rubio and his leadership team full license to scrub very closely each senior career diplomat entrusted with running an embassy or advancing the administration’s agenda.
Phillip Linderman is chairman of the Ben Franklin Fellowship and a board member at the Center for Immigration Studies.