If the Washington Post‘s bombshell report Monday is true, then President Trump has a big, big problem on his hands. As the Post reported, last Wednesday in the Oval Office Trump relayed what had been highly classified intelligence information related to ISIS to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The response from the administration, chiefly through national security advisor H.R. McMaster, has been to deny what the paper’s story doesn’t suggest.
“At no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed, and no military operations were disclosed that were not already known publicly,” McMaster told the Post.
That’s a carefully worded statement (as have been those from other administration officials) that fails to deny the actual reporting of the article. What the Post‘s sources said was that Trump had shared intelligence information, which is distinct from the sources or methods used to obtain that information. The paper did note that the information Trump revealed had been “provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government.”
We can perhaps take McMaster at his word that Trump discussed no “sources or methods” in his meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak. But as sources formerly within the intelligence community tell THE WEEKLY STANDARD, the information itself could be enough for Russia, which conducts its own extensive intelligence operations in the Middle East region, to piece together who the source and methods are. President Trump may not have directly divulged our intelligence source to the Russians, but it’s conceivable they could have learned enough from what he did tell them to figure it out.
Beyond the risk of exposure to the intelligence assets of ourselves and our allies, revealing information obtained through intelligence sharing without the permission of the source agency is a damaging break from protocol and duty. Here’s how a former senior intelligence officer put it: “Sharing of another country’s intel without permission is one of the brightest red lines in the intel world.” Intelligence shared from other nations is some of the most tightly held information our government possesses. The source for the information Trump reportedly shared is likely to think twice before sharing intelligence with the U.S. again any time soon.
That is, if the Post‘s reporting, and that of several other outlets (like the New York Times and Reuters), is accurate. Perhaps it’s not. Perhaps the anonymous sources providing the information to reporters are simply out to get Trump—and if they hail from the intelligence community, which has a frosty relationship with the president, that is a real possibility. Perhaps, as this thorough, comprehensive, and critical overview of the whole issue at Lawfare suggests, Trump had a reason to declassify the information in the way that he did.
But when the White House itself has failed to offer an outright denial of the story and is obfuscating and dissembling about the nature of their response, it’s worth taking seriously the implications of the Post‘s revelation.
