I'm not going to speak for the parent poster, but on one hand you have: leaking details of controversial secret actions from a powerful government organization

I'm not going to speak for the parent poster, but on one hand you have: leaking details of controversial secret actions from a powerful government organization to a journalist. On the other hand you have leaking from a journalist "his" scoop that was already in the pipeline to get published without any indication there is an immediate time pressure justifying it. These two immediately strike me as very qualitatively different, and if we assume that the parent poster is actually talking about ethics it would follow that they do not have an absolutist view on leaking and that the context matters.