The White House national security adviser on Tuesday did not deny several reports that President Donald Trump disclosed to high-ranking Russian officials previously classified intelligence from a foreign intelligence service. Speaking to reporters at the White House, H.R. McMaster said repeatedly he would not be commenting on what information was and was not classified. But McMaster did appear to tacitly confirm the initial reports that Trump had revealed some kind of sensitive information to the Russians.
He stated that President Trump’s conversation with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak was “wholly appropriate” and “consistent with the routine sharing of information” among foreign leaders about terrorist threats, including from ISIS. When asked if he stood by his statement on Monday evening that the Washington Post article that first reported the disclosure of classified intelligence was “false,” McMaster slightly hedged. “The premise of that article was false,” he said.
“The story combined what was leaked with other information and it insinuated about sources and methods,” he added later.
But throughout his briefing, McMaster let on that the president did reveal some information to the Russians. When pressed about whether that intelligence was a specific city in the Middle East, McMaster said that whatever Trump may have said was “nothing that you would not know from open-source reporting in terms of a source of concern.”
McMaster also said Trump “wasn’t even aware of where this information came from.”
“He wasn’t briefed on the source or method of the information, either,” he added.
Several times the national security adviser argued the conversation was appropriate. “The president was meeting with the foreign minister about the terrorist threat,” McMaster said. “He also raised some difficult issues about what we expected in terms of different behavior from Russia in key areas like Ukraine and Syria. But then the president was emphasizing, ‘We have a common interest here. We have to work together in some critical areas.'”
When pressed on the detail from the original Post story that homeland security adviser Thomas Bossert had contacted the heads of the CIA and the National Security Agency following the Oval Office meeting with the Russians, McMaster said “I’m not sure” and suggested Bossert had done so due to an “overabundance of caution.”
The Post story reported Bossert’s calls were made to “contain the potential fallout.”
McMaster was not asked about and did not comment on a report that a subordinate of Bossert “called for the problematic portion of Trump’s discussion to be stricken from internal memos and for the full transcript to be limited to a small circle of recipients.” The “full transcript” was most likely a memorandum of conversation (in the jargon, a MemCon), official notes on what was discussed in the meeting. A number of lawmakers on Capitol Hill have started requesting the White House disclose the MemCon to Congress, perhaps with redactions and in a closed-door meeting. As McMaster left the briefing room after taking questions for just over 10 minutes, several reporters asked in vain if the record of the meeting would be released.
