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DonViejo

(60,536 posts) Tue May 16, 2017, 07:53 AM May 2017

Donald Trump Defends Sharing Intelligence With Russia

By ANDREW E. KRAMER MAY 16, 2017

President Trump declared on Twitter early Tuesday that he had an “absolute right” to share with top Russian officials information about an Islamic State threat during a White House meeting last week.

He spoke out after multiple news accounts emerged that he had disclosed classified information to the Russian officials, possibly jeopardizing a relationship with an intelligence-sharing ally.

Link to tweet

Mr. Trump spoke about highly classified intelligence in a meeting with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, last week, a current and a former American government official told The New York Times on Monday. The news was first reported by The Washington Post, and soon after, many organizations — including Buzzfeed, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and The Times — quickly published their own accounts of the disclosure.

Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, issued a statement denying that Mr. Trump had disclosed intelligence methods or sources. But The Post and the other news organizations did not report that he had done so. Instead, they focused on the breach of espionage etiquette; the possibility that American allies might be discouraged from sharing intelligence with the United States; and Mr. Trump’s tendency to go off-script, at times to the chagrin of his advisers.

more
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/us/politics/trump-intelligence-russia-classified.html