Leaks have always been a part of American politics, but they’ve become an increasingly essential part of the way we get news about the Trump administration. They’re a function of government employees exasperated by the Trump team’s woeful incompetence as well as the antagonistic attitude of Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon, and Kellyanne Conway toward the public’s right to information. If you ask Fox News, of course, leaks are the only story that matter—much more important than the information actually being leaked. We’re increasingly used to poring over uploaded PDFs of confidential documents, scouring them for any mention of, say, a presidential candidate hiring Russian sex workers to piss on a bed for him.