When he was a candidate, Donald Trump loved leaks, going so far as to encourage Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s email accounts and share the results with the world. Now that he’s president, leaks are very “un-American.”

Leaks are finding their way into news stories that paint an unflattering picture of the administration’s relationship with Russian intelligence officials. That puts the president in an uncomfortable spot, U.S. News & World Report’s Pat Garofalo wrote in an opinion piece Feb. 16.

“…. Trump seems torn between wanting to blame leakers or the ‘fake news’ media for his current imbroglio – which is utterly incoherent since either the information is legit and leakers are to blame, or it’s false and therefore the media is the culprit. So he’s just taken to doing both …”

We actually agree with the president that leaks shouldn’t be coming out of America’s intelligence community. But he’s wrong to try to punish the media just for doing its job – as he did Friday by barring journalists from The New York Times and several other news organizations from attending a daily White House briefing.

Read more at The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.