I’ll be charitable and choose to believe they quit in disgust at Trump’s treachery, but I have been known to overestimate the integrity of Conservatives before.

Still, the NYT outing the guy just to get a scoop is unforgivable.

“Astonishing for the NYT to essentially out the whistleblower in a story that doesn’t advance what we already knew on the same day the President threatened retribution,” wrote former Obama administration adviser Ben Rhodes. “It’s time to replace Dean Baquet,” wrote think-tanker Norm Ornstein in a vote of no-confidence for the newspaper’s executive editor. “I cannot think of a good reason for the Times to publish information about the whistleblower’s identity,” offered Vox’s Zack Beauchamp. “Wow, at face value this seems wrong,” tut-tutted the Atlantic’s James Fallows.

Without a doubt, the Times story has complicated the CIA whistleblower’s life by poking holes in the cloak of anonymity he used to shroud himself from exposure. But if he’s as seasoned as the Times sketch makes him out to be, he had to know that the contents and style of his official complaint to the intelligence community’s inspector general would draw arrows pointing directly to him and eventually puncture his anonymity. As the Times piece points out, the language of his complaint revealed him as someone “steeped in details of American foreign policy toward Europe, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of Ukrainian politics and at least some knowledge of the law.” It was never going to take much sleuthing by the White House to ferret him out.

Brookings Institute senior fellow Tom Wright, who criticized the Times for making its disclosure, made this point in a Thursday afternoon tweet. “Rumors that the whistleblower was an IC officer detailed to the NSC were circulating widely yesterday [Wednesday]. I still think they should not have published it, but I doubt it was news to Trump and his associates,” Wright wrote. Evidence that the whistleblower was hiding in plain sight came a few hours after the Times story went online, when the Wall Street Journal confirmed its salient details.