The clarity just keeps on getting clearer and clearer.
Yeah, that’s what I said. But then Toby said (in effect) that he wasn’t sure he would kill his brother to keep the secret.
Check TWOP. It’s the last episode of Season 6 and the first three or so of Season 7.
I wasn’t arguing Toby’s motivation, just quoting the spoken lines. I thought at the time that his statement made him think about the situation. Whatever. 
I’d forgotten that line but to me it seems to eliminate any chance that Toby’s brother was the one who revealed the secret to Toby.
The characters on TWW (and any other good TV show) are human beings, flawed and sometimes self-contradictory. I think the issue of the weaponization of space was mostly Toby’s way of rationalizing his decision to leak. Deep down, he was very uncomfortable with the thought of astronauts dying when he had it in his power to prevent it… previous anti-leaking comments notwithstanding.
Another factor was that Toby clearly felt that the “team” had let him down as well. He was openly angry at Will and Josh for leaving to seek other jobs and refused to accept their explanations that they were trying to work with an eye towards the future. He was probably also internally angry about other people, including Bartlett and himself, not having done all that could have been done in eight years. I think it was his repressed frustration that pushed him over the edge.
So you think it was an intentional artistic choice that drove simpleminded me crazy trying to figure it out? I think it was a story-line screwup of massive proportions, but then again, I’m kinda simpleminded…
That’s probably the best explanation for what happened. Unfortunately, the writers decllined to present it this way on the show. It could have easily been worked into his discussion with Andi on Halloween at her house.
I credit The West Wing for avoiding that kind of thing. People in real life don’t make the kind of explanatory exposition about their actions. But screenwriters frequently feel the need to have their characters stop and explain themselves. It’s an indication that the screenwriter wasn’t doing his job.
Yeah, well, the difference here, Little Nemo, is that life ain’t art. IRL, you can keep stuff to yourself and baffle everyone around you as to your motivations and your thought processes and no one gets to know things that you don’t reveal except by wild speculation. In art, the way it works, is that the artist gets to make his meaning clear if he chooses. Sometimes, in fine art, that meaning may be understood by a very few people, and that’s fine. In a mass medium, however, the artist must plainly make things clear to many people, as even the West Wing’s fine writers (i.e., Sorkin) usually chose to do. The fact that they (i.e., non-Sorkin WW writers) opted to do otherwise here suggests that this is a massive brainfart, the first 14 letters of which you’re choosing to ignore, as is your right.
I’m not ignoring the other posts; I’m disagreeing with them. I don’t want to disparage anyone else, but I thought the answers to these questions had been made pretty clear. I thought it was obvious that Toby was the leaker, that he was frustrated in the final months of the Bartlett administration, that he was bitter about people who left the administration, and that he had not received classified information from his brother. The only questions that were left to the viewer were who did tell the classified information to Toby (and I’ve offered my theory) and what were Toby’s exact motives for leaking it (I think his motives were a mixture of idealism, frustration, and pain over his brother’s death).