White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told staffers he fed information to suspected leakers to see if they'd tell the media, according to report

• President Donald Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has told staffers he's tried to identify leakers by selectively disclosing information to certain people, Axios reported Sunday.
• According to Axios, Trump stressed to Meadows that it was important to "find the leakers" in the administration, which has been plagued with high-profile leaks.
• The outlet added that Trump was particularly angry about two recent leaks: the news that US intelligence suspected Russia of placing bounties on US troops in Afghanistan and that Trump was rushed to the White House bunker during recent Black Lives Matter protests.

President Donald Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has told staffers he's slipped information to people in the White House to see whether they'd share the information with the media, Axios reported on Sunday.

According to Axios, Trump stressed to Meadows that it was important to "find the leakers" in the administration, which has been plagued by a series of high-profile leaks. The push to identify White House media informants has put some staffers "on edge," Axios said, citing multiple unnamed officials as saying Meadows had been "unusually vocal about his tactics."

"Meadows told me he was doing that," a former White House official told Axios. "I don't know if it ever worked."

As Axios noted, Meadows said last month on Sen. Ted Cruz's podcast, "The Verdict," that he had tracked down and fired a federal employee who leaked a draft of Trump's executive order targeting social-media companies to The New York Times.

Axios added that Trump was particularly angry about two recent leaks, one revealing that US intelligence suspected Russia of placing bounties on US troops in Afghanistan and the other noting that he had been rushed to the White House bunker during recent Black Lives Matter protests.

According to The Times, Trump has told officials he is determined to find and prosecute the person who leaked the story about his trip to the bunker. Trump publicly denied fleeing to the bunker for his protection and said he was there instead for "more for an inspection," adding that he was there only "for a tiny, short little period of time."

Meadows is Trump's fourth chief of staff in less than four years, though his predecessors also worked in a White House with major leaks.

In 2018, an anonymous senior White House official wrote an opinion article in The Times describing a secret resistance against the president within his administration.

"Many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations," the author, who remains anonymous, wrote. "I would know. I am one of them."

The official went on to write a bombshell book about Trump's presidency titled "A Warning," which compared Trump's late-night tweeting to finding your "elderly uncle running pantsless across the courtyard."