https://zeteo.com/p/more-paranoid-trump-pushes-officials
‘More Paranoid’ Trump Pushes Officials to Raid Reporters’ Homes
Donald Trump’s war on the press and leakers is on track to get much worse – and fast.
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Donald Trump is positively furious about leaks from within his administration about his failing, illegal war in Iran – and he wants a clampdown so bad he’s urging his officials to conduct more raids on journalists’ homes and other severe measures, sources tell Zeteo.
According to those who’ve talked to the president about this recently, it is difficult to overstate how much these leaks are setting him off.
“It’s all made him even more paranoid,” says one longtime adviser to the U.S. president. “He has asked some Cabinet members who they think leaked the information… To those members of his Cabinet, I’d say what I’ve been saying for a month: If you want to find the [Iran-war] leakers, you may want to just look in the mirror.”
Last month, Zeteo reported on how President Trump had ordered a massive leak hunt, including at the upper echelons of his government and inner sanctum, to try to figure out who’s been blabbing to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, and other journalists in legacy media.
The president was incensed by disclosures to the press on how a wide array of his Cabinet appointees and other senior U.S. officials were squeamish or skeptical about launching a war on Iran, during the run-up to the Middle East conflict.
This included details (at times from highly classified settings like the White House Situation Room) in a Times excerpt from Swan and Haberman’s upcoming book that were so damning and specific that various administration officials became convinced the accounts must have been leaked by people in the room or at the highest level of government.
The president, sources in and out of government with direct knowledge of the matter tell Zeteo, was uniquely mad – even for him – about the Iran-war leaks, and his fury has barely abated more than a month on. In recent weeks, Trump has repeatedly pressed administration officials on why FBI agents haven’t raided the homes of the journalists who got these leaks, according to two people with direct knowledge.
Trump, the sources add, insists that doing so would be a legitimate action in a criminal leak investigation because “national security” is supposedly at stake, and he has made the point that his administration already raided the home of a journalist early this year, arguing they can and should do more of that.
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On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has vented to his acting attorney general – his former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche – about the press leaks, causing the Department of Justice to launch sprawling investigations into the matter. “Blanche vowed to secure subpoenas specifically targeting the records of reporters who have worked on sensitive national security stories,” the Journal reported, and in “one meeting, Trump passed a stack of news articles he and other senior officials thought threatened national security to Blanche with a sticky note on it that said ‘treason.’” The newspaper also revealed that it had indeed “received subpoenas for records of reporters.”
In conversations with top administration officials, including his acting attorney general, Trump has stressed that journalists who aren’t complying with these subpoenas should be jailed alongside violent inmates, until they give up their confidential sources, an administration official and another person familiar with the situation tell Zeteo. The president’s private urgings mirror his public declarations that he’s been making for years about how political and national-security reporters should have to choose between selling out their anonymous sources and prison rape and torture in a US jail.
Separately, administration officials have discussed conducting and potentially expanding the kind of secret seizures of journalists’ records that the feds did during Trump’s first presidency, two advisers to the president say.
“Leaking classified information regarding sensitive military operations is a felony offense that puts American lives at risk,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly tells Zeteo. “The Trump administration will not hesitate to hold criminals who break the law and endanger the safety of our servicemembers and the national security of our homeland accountable.”
A DOJ spokesperson says that “the Department of Justice follows the facts and applies the law to identify those committing crimes against the United States.”
The Trump White House is currently putting a mammoth amount of pressure on Blanche to sharply escalate the administration’s legal warfare on the media and the president’s enemies, sources say, and the acting AG has so far been more than willing to oblige.
However, some of Blanche’s administration colleagues predict to Zeteo that there is only so far he can go before he runs into the same roadblocks in court and elsewhere that slowed down his predecessor Pam Bondi’s attempted DOJ crackdowns and efforts to target Trump’s political enemies. That loss of momentum and apparent queasiness about shattering enough norms to satisfy her boss’s corrupt and patently authoritarian desires helped doom Bondi’s tenure atop the Justice Department earlier this year, clearing the way for Blanche’s rise.
“The leak hunt is a big deal right now,” one Trump administration official told Zeteolast month.
In early April, several Trump allies and administration appointees privately admitted that they were genuinely scared about what would happen to some of these leakers, especially those who shared sensitive information about the war in Iran, if the president were to find out their identities. One source said at the time that they and others working in the Trump-Vance administration were warned by a more senior official that “if you talked to Jonathan or Maggie, [you] better be good at covering your tracks.”
All of this is happening in the much broader context of Team Trump’s expansive crackdowns on a free press, dissent, freedom of speech, and the president’s enemies, some of whom the federal government targets simply because they pissed off the president.
The president and some of his lieutenants feel that they didn’t crack down on the media and leakers or whistleblowers hard enough during Trump’s first term in office. Team Trump is determined not to make that same mistake twice, and they’ve been plotting how to dramatically escalate the state-sponsored clampdown ever since at least 2024.
“Oh, it’ll be brutal,” one conservative attorney – who had discussed some of this planning with Trump and his inner orbit – told Rolling Stone in late 2024. “Gloves off … We’ve learned our lessons from the first time and one lesson is you have got to be even more aggressive.”
They weren’t bluffing.
Trump continued to escalate his attacks on the press Tuesday afternoon, as he wrote on Truth Social: “When the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, Militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON in that it is such a false, and even preposterous, statement. They are aiding and abetting the enemy!”
About 40 minutes later, Haberman, Swan, and another journalist reported at the New York Times that, contrary to Trump’s public claims, “classified assessments from early this month … show Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers, and underground facilities.”
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