President Donald Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in last week's meeting at the White House, according to a report by the Washington Post.
Here are a few paragraphs from the Post’s report:
“This is information that current and former U.S. officials say could jeopardize a valuable source of intelligence in the fight against ISIS and give an adversarial Russia a strategic advantage in Syria, where its goals are different from ours. If there is something worse Trump could have done in that meeting, I'm not sure what it would be.
“The details of what exactly Trump discussed with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on Wednesday are sketchy, and The Washington Post is withholding some of them for national security reasons. But according to the officials, Trump relayed information from an intelligence-sharing arrangement that is so sensitive that some details aren't even shared with U.S. allies or broadly within the U.S. government. Trump cited the specifics of an ISIS plot and, most problematically, named the city in the Islamic State's territory where the U.S.' partner detected the threat.
“Needless to say, sharing information with the Russian government that isn’t even being shared with allies is a big blunder. Trump has broad authority to declassify information, so he was probably within his rights to talk about it. But this is something that can credibly be described as Trump doing damage to the fight against the Islamic State with his loose lips.”
By Aaron Blake
