It’s no secret that Donald Trump hates anyone in his administration leaking to the press. He has publicly called them “cowards and traitors” in his twitter storms.

On Thursday news report said his administration found and arrested its first leaker — not a high-level White House leaker, but a civil servant in the financial crimes division at the Treasury Department. And there is a Donald-sized punch line — the first leaker nabbed turns out to be a Trump supporter.

 Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, a senior adviser at the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), is accused of leaking information about private citizens’ bank transactions, called Suspicious Activity Reports. Edwards provided a reporter with data that was used in 12 articles, the Department of Justice alleges.

Edwards and “an unnamed co-conspirator” (whom the WSJ identified as FinCEN colleague Kip Brailey) were allegedly in contact with the reporter for a year. Brailey’s attorney told the WSJ that Brailey, “is not a co-conspirator with anyone.”

[…]Both Edwards and Brailey regularly shared posts attacking liberals and sympathizing with Trump, the WSJ reports. Edwards reportedly “liked” an article calling Trump critic and former CIA director John Brennan a “hack,” and called sexual assault allegations against Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh “false” and said they set a bad precedent. Brailey apparently retweeted a message calling Hillary Clinton a liar and posts from women who said they didn’t vote for her in 2016.

Reports are that the leaked documents include bank records from Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort (currently in jail), former campaign aide Rick Gates, and Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen. All three are up to their necks in the investigation into possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia in 2016 and are said to be cooperating with Mueller. Whatever the motivation may have been for the alleged leaks isn’t clear. Edwards told investigators she was a “whistleblower.”

The Wall Street Journal speculates: The employee accused of the leaks—Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, a senior adviser at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN — is a supporter of President Trump who believed, along with some colleagues, that another Treasury unit was mishandling sensitive data, according to people familiar with the matter.

What, why, or who Natalie Edwards at Treasury may have been blowing a whistle about may never be clear, but one thing is: bad things can happen to presidents who become obsessed and paranoid about press leaks.

There were reports this summer that Donald Trump became so obsessed about leakers in his administration that for a time he carried around a handwritten list of suspected leakers — like an orange orangutan version of Captain Queeg imagining “deep state” civil servant adversaries, aka “cowards and traitors” infesting his otherwise idyllic and pristine administration.

Forty-one years ago President Nixon’s downfall began when enraged by leaks to the press from his administration, he formed a secret squad of White House “plumbers” to plug them. The “plumbers” were the ones caught after breaking into the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex.

Remember what happened to him? He was hoisted on his own paranoid petard (look it up) by his own taped conversations and condemned by testimony from fired high-level members of his administration.

But of course P-45, the current occupant of the White House (looking dingier by the minute), “don’t know much about history.” But he’s a stable genius.