US President Donald Trump has repeatedly fumed on Twitter about leaks (File)
For months, US President Donald Trump has repeatedly fumed on Twitter about leaks to the "fake news" media seen as casting his administration in a bad light.
Now he apparently plans to do something about it.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats are to hold a briefing on Friday to address "leaks of classified material threatening national security."
The announcement comes after six months of political intrigue and open feuding in the White House, which has manifested itself in a torrent of damaging revelations to the media.
It also comes after a leak that was unusual even by the standards of this administration -- the publication by The Washington Post of the contents of private phone calls between Trump and foreign leaders.
The newspaper published the full transcripts Thursday of conversations the Republican billionaire leader held in January with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
Trump urged Pena Nieto, according to the transcripts, to stop saying publicly that he would not pay for the promised border wall with Mexico and he told Turnbull, after an acrimonious exchange, that theirs was his "most unpleasant call all day."
While Trump has yet to address the leak of his personal calls, he has raged against "illegal leaks" in the past and even went so far as to lash out publicly at Sessions last week for taking what he called a "very weak" position on the issue.
In a move seen in part as a bid to impose more discipline on the White House, Trump last week also named John Kelly, a no-nonsense retired Marine Corps general, to be his new chief of staff.
Leaks have long been the currency of politicians and journalists in the US capital, and they figured prominently in the 2016 presidential campaign with the publication by WikiLeaks of emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign.
But the extraordinary leak of the transcripts of private phone calls between a US president and foreign leaders was met with some concern -- even from outspoken Trump critics.
"Leaking the transcript of a presidential call to a foreign leader is unprecedented, shocking, and dangerous," David Frum, a former speechwriter for president George W. Bush, wrote in The Atlantic.
"It is vitally important that a president be able to speak confidentially -- and perhaps even more important that foreign leaders understand that they can reply in confidence," said Frum.
"If these calls can be leaked, any call can be leaked -- and no leader dare say anything to the president of the United States that he or she would not wish to read in the news at home."
- 'Dangerous to our foreign policy' -
John Kirby, who served as spokesman for both the Pentagon and the State Department under president Barack Obama, agreed with Frum.
"Regardless of one's politics or of reasons behind the leak, it is dangerous to our foreign policy," Kirby said on Twitter.
"I would've lost my mind if transcripts of Obama's calls to foreign leaders leaked," said Tommy Vietor, Obama's former National Security Council spokesman.
"He wouldn't have sounded so dumb, but it's still absurd," Vietor said on Twitter.
The Republican staff on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security published a report last month that concluded there has been an "unprecedented wave of potentially damaging leaks of information" since Trump took office in January.
"Under President Trump's predecessors, leaks of national security information were relatively rare," the report said. "Under President Trump, leaks are flowing at the rate of one a day."
"The sheer volume and scope of the sources indicates that they are coming from across the government," the report said, adding that most of the leaks so far have concerned the various investigations into alleged collusion between Russia and members of the Trump election campaign.
"But the leak frenzy has gone far beyond the Kremlin and has extended to other sensitive information that could harm national security," the report said.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)