Trump was unaware of the source of the information?
The Times reports it was Israel.
The classified intelligence that President Trump disclosed in a meeting last week with Russian officials at the White House was provided by Israel, according to a current and a former American official familiar with how the United States obtained the information. The revelation adds a potential diplomatic complication to the episode.
Israel is one of the United States’ most important allies and a major intelligence collector in the Middle East. The revelation that Mr. Trump boasted about some of Israel’s most sensitive information to the Russians could damage the relationship between the two countries. It also raises the possibility that the information could be passed to Iran, Russia’s close ally and Israel’s main threat in the Middle East.
Israeli officials declined to confirm.
In the meeting with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister, Mr. Trump disclosed intelligence about an Islamic State terrorist plot. At least some of the details that the United States has about the plot came from the Israelis, the officials said.
The officials, who were not authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Israel previously had urged the United States to be careful about the handling of the intelligence that Mr. Trump discussed.
Yes but this is Russia we’re talking about, our dear dear friend Russia, who loves us so much and has our best interests at heart, not to mention Israel’s. Russia is a great friend to Israel, as well as to us. All this is just a super-friendly conversation among three close buddies.
Mr. Trump said Tuesday on Twitter that he had an “absolute right” to share information in the interest of fighting terrorism and called it a “very, very successful meeting” in a brief appearance later Tuesday at the White House alongside President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
Erdogan. Of course.
“What the president discussed with the foreign minister was wholly appropriate to that conversation and is consistent with the routine sharing of information between the president and any leaders with whom he’s engaged,” General McMaster said at a White House briefing, seeking to play down the sensitivity of the information Mr. Trump disclosed.
General McMaster added that the president, who he said was unaware of the source of the information, made a spur-of-the-moment decision to tell the Russians what he knew.
Wait. Why was Trump unaware of the source of the information? Because he didn’t read his briefings? Or because it’s one of the pieces the national security are keeping back from him because he’s so reckless? If it’s the second – doesn’t that just put the lid on it? He’s too dangerous for this job no matter what you do: if you give him the intel he blabs it, and if you don’t give him the intel he blabs it.
But General McMaster also appeared to acknowledge that Thomas P. Bossert, the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, had called the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency after the meeting with the Russian officials. Other officials have said that the spy agencies were contacted to help contain the damage from the leak to the Russians.
General McMaster would not confirm that Mr. Bossert made the calls but suggested that if he did, he was acting “maybe from an overabundance of caution.”
An overabundance of caution? Really? I wonder if he’s consulted Israel on that.
Israel’s concerns about the Trump White House’s handling of classified information were foreshadowed in the Israeli news media earlier this year. Newspapers there reported in January that American officials warned their Israeli counterparts to be careful about what they told the Trump administration because it could be leaked to the Russians, given Mr. Trump’s openness toward President Vladimir V. Putin.
Oh well. At least we got those nice Oval Office photos out of the deal.
Here’s a cheery thought for you:
That from uber-conservative writer Erick Erickson
BuzzFeed said that too. I haven’t read the piece yet.
Screechy Monkey@1:
BBC is reporting that the leaked information had a “codeword” classification. “Confidential” means that if the info is leaked, it could cause damage to national security. “Secret” means the same thing but “serious damage”. “Top secret” means “grave damage”. “Codeword” is top secret, but the information is only shared with people who have been given a special codeword.
So pretty much the worst possible leak.
James Garnett,
Right, but I assume that some breaches of code word security would be more likely to be harmful than others (or at least, in the hands of the Russians you’d be more worried about some things, i.e. anything affecting their allies in Iran and Syria, than others).
I think the Erickson piece was written before the NY Times story about this being Israeli intelligence, so it’s possible that this is what Erickson was referring to. We know that the Israelis were warned during the transition about sharing intel with the Trump administration, so being burned like this could really affect cooperation going forward. Or it could be some other aspect entirely that is “worse than we know.”
It’s a little suspicious to me that McMaster’s non-denial denial of the WaPo story was to insist that no “sources or methods” were revealed. As many people pointed out, the WaPo story never claimed that Trump identified sources or methods, so technically McMaster wasn’t contradicting anything in the story. That could have been just a deliberate obfuscating tactic (“we can’t deny anything that’s actually in the story, so let’s strawman it”), or it may have been an attempt to get out in front of possible follow-on stories. I have heard it claimed that, by specifying the intel and the city from which it originated, Trump gave the Russians enough that it could lead to sources or methods, even if he didn’t actually say it directly.
Even I have glimpsed as much, and I am mostly in my very own loop.
CNN claims that, prior to this Russian visit, it had the information on this “laptop terror threat,” including the name of the city where the intel came from. The administration warned CNN that disclosing the name of the city would get people killed, and CNN decided not to include that in its report.