White House Aide’s Plan to Stop Leaks: Spy on His Co-Workers

Ezra Cohen-Watnick ran intelligence for the National Security Council. There, he decided collecting his colleagues’ phone and email data was a good idea.

By SPENCER ACKERMAN @ DailyBeast.com, May 13

[....] Cohen-Watnick is now re-emerging from a post-White House stint at the software behemoth Oracle to take a senior advisory role to Sessions, ostensibly about counterintelligence and counterterrorism. It’s happening right as the White House is once again obsessed with leaks and angry at the Justice Department for the Russia probe. Yet practically every major administration figure, including Trump himself, is being accused of leaking.

That’s caused Cohen-Watnick’s former colleagues, who spoke on condition of anonymity, to recall the insider-threat episode out of suspicion that his new role is to be a political commissar, ensuring Sessions toes the party line desired by a president who distrusts his attorney general. Unlike previous national-security aides to attorneys general, Cohen-Watnick is not a lawyer, and the Justice Department, for more than a decade, has a formal national-security division working on such issues.

“I used to refer to him as the one most likely to end up like Ollie North,” said a former Trump NSC official [....]