It would be easy to think the Washington Post just has the right combination of generic traits, and that’s why they’ve been the ones pumping out all the (laughable) themage from anonymous intelligence officials about Mike Flynn, phone calls, Russia, Trump, investigations, suspicion, chaos, fear, loathing, and yada yada yada.

Traits like reporter relationships with intelligence community personalities, right?  You could buy that.  Everyone’s there in the D.C. area, sitting on the same lunch stools.  Running on the same tree-lined paths.  Doing all that thriller-movie stuff on the leafy banks of the Potomac.

Of course, the other news organizations all have D.C. bureaus too.  They know people.

But, hey, it’s the Washington Post.  Woodward and Bernstein.  Ben Bradlee.  Katharine Graham.  So, OK, that was more than 40 years ago.  And if you paid attention during the Obama years, it seemed like the New York Times and NBC Universal’s properties were getting an awful lot of the leaked “scoop,” maybe even at the expense of WaPo.

But you could still kind of buy that it’s coincidental factors making WaPo the path of least journalistic resistance, for the torrent of themed propaganda coming out, we are told, from intel community officials.  These are obviously unhappy officials, taking arms against the Trump administration from inside the U.S. government.  Not only that, but at least nine of them were clearly in the Obama administration – something WaPo (perhaps unintentionally) clarified in its 9 February story explaining that all of those sources had primary information from the time Mike Flynn had the supposedly controversial phone calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.  Which was when Obama was still president.