Sir Humphrey Appleby, I think.

And here I always thought it was the responsibility of the government official with access to secrets to make sure whomever s/he reveals them to has a clearance and a need to know.

I suppose it’s easier on the White House, at this point, to just blame the reporters.

Then of course there’s that theory that it’s okay for an individual at a particular level to arbitrarily classify or declassify information on the fly, according to personal convenience.

It must be nice to rewrite the rules as you go along. Sort of like that Easy Button from Staples.
I can just hear certain officials singing “I got the power” as they press that red button.

Arguably, an important difference between the Clinton admin and this one is that in the current admin all three branches of government are effectively controlled by the same party, which seems to be seriously eroding the separation of powers. As much as I want to believe that the Democrats are the Good Guys™, I suspect we’d see a similar phenomenon if all three branches were Democrat-controlled. The absence of a meaningful opposition party has pretty thoroughly distorted things.

Yes, obviously. That’s the point of what he’s doing.

Has anyone tried an ‘effective separation of powers’? How did it work out in practice?

Weber is useful, but the traits he identifies are generally applicable and not peculiar to the present administration. The Clinton administration wasn’t exactly a paragon of transparency either, although it did prefer to use the IRS instead of the DOJ to silence its critics.