White House defends Trump on classified intel report

Source: The Hill | May 15, 2017 | Katie Bo Williams and Jordan Fabian

The White House on Monday evening pushed back sharply on reports that President Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian officials during a meeting last week.

Speaking to the press outside the White House Monday evening, national security advisor H.R. McMaster said: “The story that came out tonight, as reported, is false.”

“The president and the foreign minister reviewed a range of common threats to our two countries, including threats to civil aviation. At no time — at no time were intelligence sources or methods discussed. And the president did not disclose any military operations that were not already publicly known. Two other senior officials who were present, including the secretary of State, remember the meeting the same way and have said so.

“Their on-the-record accounts should outweigh those of anonymous sources. I was in the room, it didn’t happen,” he said. 

In statements, McMaster two other senior Trump officials sought to characterize the disclosures as benign and pertaining only to “common threats.”

“The nature of specific threats were discussed, but they did not discuss sources, methods or military operations,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in a statement.

Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy Dina Powell, who also attended the meeting, called The Washington Post report “false” in a statement of her own. 

According to The Post, Trump provided “code-word information” to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kilsyac, using a government term that refers to the highest level of classification. The intelligence had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement.

But the White House denial — that Trump did not explicitly discuss the sources and methods behind the intelligence — did not directly address or nullify the Post’s reporting.

According to The Post, the information Trump revealed included details that Russia could use to reverse-engineer the sources or methods used to gather the intelligence, officials told the paper.

Among those details was the name of the city in Islamic State territory where the U.S. partner detected the threat, seen as a particularly sensitive disclosure that could allow Russia to identify the intelligence capability involved.

That capability is highly valuable. It could be used to provide intelligence on Russia’s involvement in Syria, officials said, and the Kremlin would have an intense interest in identifying and disrupting it.

According to The Post, White House officials immediately realized the seriousness of the president’s disclosures and sought to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA).

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, were caught by surprise by the shocking revelation.

But the news quickly drew criticism — even from Republicans.

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