National Security Adviser Tom Donilon

National Security Adviser Tom Donilon Carolyn Kaster/AP

The right has found their leaker

Several conservatives believe national security adviser Tom Donilon is behind the latest round of security leaks.

The Justice Department investigation into who leaked national security secrets hasn't even started yet and most experts say it will drag on for months but a rising chorus of conservatives think they've got their man: national security adviser Tom Donilon. 
 
It's a charge based on pure speculation, but you wouldn't get that impression if you were, say, watching Sean Hannity this week. On a broadcast Monday, the Fox News host claimed to be introducing a guest "who knows exactly who spoke to The New York Times" about the classified information and proceeded to interview former Democratic pollster Pat Caddell. When asked to spill the beans, Caddell a Fox News contributor and semi-famous "self-loathing Democrat" started bizarrely parsing his words


HANNITY You're a Democrat, you are saying definitively you know.
 
CADDELL: I didn't say I definitively know. I said I definitively know who it was. You know, there is a difference.
 
We have no idea how there's a difference between those two statements but regardless, that didn't stop Caddell from being supremely confident about the source of the leak. "The culprit is clear. It's Tom Donilon, the national security adviser," he said. "Tom Donilon is a political hack. He was a political operative." Hannity immediately weighed in on the significance of Caddell's speculation, saying "Caddell's allegation is critical to this investigation, because Tom Donilon is the man who leads the presidential daily briefing each and every day inside the Oval Office." The speculative exercise didn't stop there. 

Read more at The Atlantic Wire.