Watching the White House these days is like driving down an interstate, but every two miles you have to slow to a crawl as you pass yet another car crash. More than likely, the cause of the wreck is a reckless driver, but, of course, there are the innocent occupants in the other car. Trump’s presidency feels like this endless series of car wrecks, with the victims being the country’s credibility abroad and now the reputations of his national security advisers.
Desiring to put a lid as quickly as possible on the Washington Post story about President Trump sharing highly restricted intelligence on ISIS produced by a partner intelligence service, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell rushed out statements that the Post story was “false” and that the president had not in fact shared with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister any “specific intelligence sources and methods”—the most sacrosanct elements of the intelligence effort.
But, of course, that is not what the newspaper was reporting. What Post reporters Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe wrote was that the president had “revealed highly classified information” to the Russians, which was so sensitive that “details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government.” Moreover, they reported that some familiar with the intelligence believe it would not be especially difficult for the Russians to deduce the “source” or the “method” of the intelligence. In short, Trump’s advisers were not lying, but they were, it appears, being too clever by half. And while they probably honestly think they are making the best of a bad situation, they have made it harder for the public and the press to assume they are straight shooters. With a president who is anything but, this will undoubtedly make their own efforts at steering the administration into normalcy and predictability that much more difficult.
The heart of the matter will revolve around what exactly the president did share with the Russian diplomats. (The details do matter here; and one can’t help but think, from the reporters’ sources among the intelligence community and its friends, that there is an agenda here that is tied to the community’s aggrieved relations with President Trump.) But, if the reporting is accurate, it is clear that the intelligence was obviously sensitive. It was not disseminated to allies, was highly compartmented internally, and was sensitive enough that, once it was known that Trump had spilled the beans, administration officials felt it necessary to tell both CIA and NSA. The fact that, apparently, Trump’s advisers then went so far as to scrub the internal minutes of the discussion clean of what he passed to the Russians is only further evidence that they knew he had probably gone too far.
There is also the question of how much harm Trump has done to U.S. intelligence-sharing efforts with partner and allied nations. Why trust Washington with your most precious nuggets of information if that intelligence is then shared with a president who has no filter? On this front, it’s difficult to know how long-lasting the damage might be. And, by the way, more and more details about what this intelligence was exactly will likely reach the public as reporters continue to dig, Trump’s critics attempt to further nail him for his presumed indiscretion, and members of Congress try to get to the bottom of the issue.
That said, it is not always so easy for allies to cut the Americans out if they think they might lose access to our intelligence spigot in turn. But one can easily imagine allies and, indeed, our own intelligence community may be more cautious about passing such information along to the Oval Office. It’s not the best of times for such caution given the state of the world. And of course all this runs directly counter to the Founders’ idea that the executive would be home to the government’s capacity for “secrecy, decision and dispatch.”
Not unexpectedly, given the president’s recent behavior in justifying his firing of the FBI director, he’s now doubling down on his decision to pass this intelligence along to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, tweeting that he was justified in doing so to fight terrorism, in the name of airline flight safety, and because he wanted the Russians to “step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism.” But the issue isn’t Trump’s goals so much as his judgment about what was necessary to tell the Russians in order to promote those goals and his judgment that divulging as much as he apparently did would actually move Moscow’s own strategic thinking about Syria and ISIS. McMaster is now saying the conversation was “wholly appropriate” in context. It is impossible to assess this conclusion from the outside. Yet reports that the president was bragging to his Russian guests about the intelligence he gets as president suggest a chief executive without the kind of internal governor we expect senior officials, let alone presidents, to have. Given the president’s (short) history, it is hardly a great leap to judge that he probably stepped over the line.
To be clear, the president hasn’t done anything strictly illegal. As he and his defenders have argued, he does have the authority to declassify intelligence. Yet the president also has a duty, under his oath, to “faithfully execute the office of president.” And while that may entail many things, it certainly covers avoiding regular and continuing car wrecks.
Gary Schmitt is a resident scholar and director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a former minority staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and was executive director of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board during President Ronald Reagan’s second term.
