The drip drip drip of Kremlingate

President Trump has sacked national security adviser Michael Flynn after only 24 days on the job for lying about his conversations with the Russian ambassador before the inauguration. Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that U.S. intelligence intercepted “repeated contacts” between Trump associates and “senior Russian intelligence officials” last year, even as Vladimir Putin’s intelligence services were hacking Democratic email accounts and leaking the stolen documents to try to help Trump.

This raises questions about whether Trump or his aides were colluding with a Kremlin operation to subvert U.S. democracy.

But instead of addressing these concerns with the kind of serious, informative answers they deserve, President Trump said Thursday, “The leaks are absolutely real,” but “the news is fake.” This is as puzzling as Trump’s praise for Flynn, calling him a “wonderful man” who has “been treated very, very unfairly by the media.” But if Flynn were treated so unfairly, why didn’t Trump keep him on the job?

The president’s fans are getting riled up about the security breach, and they are floating imaginative theories about how a nefarious “Deep State” is sabotaging the Trump presidency. This is pretty rich. During the campaign, Trump said, “I love WikiLeaks,” meaning that he loved the emails that Russian intelligence was releasing via WikiLeaks. He even invited Russia to reveal even more of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Now that he is the victim, rath- er than the beneficiary, of leaks, Trump no longer likes them.

While it is better for secrets to remain secret, not all leaks are bad. Pretty much everyone would agree that there’s an exception for whistle-blowers who reveal evidence of illicit activity that needs to be exposed and stopped. That is what FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt, aka “Deep Throat,” did during Watergate, and that is what today’s leakers — whoever they are — are doing by exposing Flynn’s lies and the Trump camp’s Russia ties.

Is there a price to be paid in exposing U.S. intelligence capabilities? Perhaps, but these leaks are not remotely as damaging as those of Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden. The Russians were undoubtedly aware that their ambassador’s communications were monitored by U.S. intelligence, just as our ambassador in Moscow can expect that his communications are monitored by the Russians.

Flynn, as a former Defense Intelligence Agency director, knew this. Why he would have conducted these conversations, which he must have known were being wiretapped, and then lied about them is one of many mysteries that need to be addressed.

It would be nice if Republicans treated Kremlingate as seriously as they treated the issue of Clinton’s email server or the Benghazi attack. There is a desperate need for a credible, bipartisan investigation. Otherwise, the administration will continue to drown in the drip drip drip of leaks.