Henry Hyde Quotes

Congress leaks. That’s a fact of life.

There’s no town in the world that has the leaks that come out of this town. [Washington, DC.]

Leaks usually have more value to the public at large than the harm which they occasionally do.

The Snowden leaks were important – a legitimate scoop – and we might never have known about the NSA’s law breaking if it had not been for them.

I don't think that any government has a right to subvert the truth or to cover up the truth, and all I see WikiLeaks doing is exposing the truth.

I far more trust the press than I do the Administration with judgment of what should be secret and what shouldn’t. How many scandals has the Administration uncovered on its own?

The Official Secrets Act is not to protect secrets. It’s to protected officials.

No less a philosopher than Chief Justice Burger was outraged by Ellsberg's publication of classified documents. They belonged to the Government, Burger reasoned, and Ellsberg had no more right to give them to the people than he would have to filch another man's property off a taxicab seat. The Government, of course, commonly leaks classified documents when it deems publication convenient to manipulate public opinion to its advantage. Only the Government, it seems, has a legal right to manipulate opinion with hot documents.

When I blew the whistle on the whole thing, it was [William J.] Casey who, I felt, regarded what I had done as treason.

Most leaks from large bureaucracies are “good” leaks: no danger to national security, no harm to innocent people, information the public ought to know.

Politicians often refuse to talk about things on the grounds of national security. Most of the time it’s not national security; it’s national embarrassment.

Some things simply cannot leak. And if they do leak, the government has to do something about it.

For a long time now, there has been too much secrecy in this city. This administration stands on the side not of those seek to withhold information but who seek to make it known.

It seems like WikiLeaks has better information on Hillary Clinton than she does herself.

In Washington, the accepted method for passing along information about how the government fails to meet real-world needs is to leak it.

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has on several occasions talked about transparency as an absolute principle. I don't personally believe that.

WikiLeaks is what happens when the entire U.S. government is forced to go through a full-body scanner.

Leaks and whispers are a daily routine of news-gathering in Washington.

The fact is that when it comes to judgment as to what should be secret and what should not be secret, Julian Assange's judgment has been pretty good so far.

Let's face it: WikiLeaks exists because the mainstream media haven't done their job.

In the history of Wikileaks, nobody has claimed that the material being put out is not authentic.

People intrinsically know there are secrets being held from us. Look at WikiLeaks: There are secrets that are really true to the world.

Because of Watergate in part, I am kind of a magnet for calls and information and suggestions.

We're going to break a story that there are people on the staff on the 9-11 Commission that didn't want the 9-11 Commissioners to know the details of Able Danger because of the potential to embarrass those commissioners.

Classification is used, not to protect the national interest but to prevent national embarrassment.