In an effort to debunk a story dogging him for the last several days, President Trump seems to have revived questions. The story is the report that Trump, in his May 10 meeting in the Oval Office with two top Russian government officials, revealed up-to-then classified intelligence from a foreign ally. The administration had since made efforts to downplay the significance of the reveal without denying it entirely. Subsequent news reports stated the intelligence came from Israel.
In an appearance in Jerusalem Monday with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump seems to have confirmed this story. “I never mentioned the word or the name Israel. Never mentioned during that conversation,” Trump said, according to the White House pool report. “They’re all saying I did, so you have another story wrong. Never mentioned the word Israel.”
But Trump was never accused of telling Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak the source of the intelligence. The issue raised by intelligence experts was that Trump disclosed the information without our ally’s intelligence service’s knowledge or consent.
Furthermore, the president’s national security adviser had told reporters last week that Trump “wasn’t even aware of where this information came from.”
“He wasn’t briefed on the source or method of the information, either,” said H.R. McMaster at the White House on May 16. So at the time, according to the administration, Trump couldn’t have “mentioned the word Israel” in connection with the intelligence he disclosed to Lavrov and Kislyak.
It is possible that Trump is mentioning Israel now only because of the news reports that named Israel, which could mean that McMaster was being truthful when he said Trump didn’t know the source. But Trump’s comments make him look like he’s unwittingly incriminating himself.
