RUTHFULLY YOURS

Former government officials have been demanding anonymity from the Washington Post in order to discuss a meeting they did not attend at the White House. President Trump’s National Security Adviser, Gen. H.R. McMaster, who did attend the meeting, has been going on the record this week along with other attendees to knock down the resulting story. Yet much of the press still seems to credit the Post’s unnamed non-attendees.

Here’s the lede from the Post:

President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

On Monday evening Gen. McMaster said in response:

The story that came out tonight as reported is false. The President and the foreign minister reviewed a range of common threats to our two countries, including threats to civil aviation. At no time, at no time, were intelligence sources or methods discussed. And the president did not disclose any military operations that were not already publicly known. Two other senior officials who were present, including the Secretary of State, remember the meeting the same way and have said so. Their on-the-record accounts should outweigh those of anonymous sources. And I was in the room. It didn’t happen.

On Tuesday the national security adviser elaborated on his remarks and took questions from reporters. At his Tuesday appearance in the White House briefing room, Gen. McMaster called Mr. Trump’s discussion “wholly appropriate” and consistent with the normal sharing of information on terror threats that occurs in high-level meetings with representatives of foreign nations. He said he was not concerned by Mr. Trump’s disclosures and had not contacted any foreign governments about them.

The anonymous sources quoted by the Post, on the other hand, appear to have very deep concerns, and the Post says that some of them even know what was said at the meeting. But many of the story’s harshest critiques of the President come from people who were not only not at the meeting, but are no longer in government:

“It is all kind of shocking,” said a former senior U.S. official who is close to current administration officials. “Trump seems to be very reckless and doesn’t grasp the gravity of the things he’s dealing with, especially when it comes to intelligence and national security. And it’s all clouded because of this problem he has with Russia.”

Here’s another excerpt from the Post story specifically focused on the President’s discussion of a particular plot hatched by Islamic State:

“Everyone knows this stream is very sensitive, and the idea of sharing it at this level of granularity with the Russians is troubling,” said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who also worked closely with members of the Trump national security team. He and others spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject.

Now why are such subjects sensitive enough to require anonymity but not sensitive enough to avoid discussing with a Washington Post reporter? We normally think of current government employees needing to remain anonymous while leaking data to the press in order to keep their jobs, but it’s not immediately clear why all the former officials also deserve anonymity in this case. CONTINUE AT SITE

The state of the Trump Presidency has been perpetual turbulence, which seems to be how the principal likes it. The latest vortex is over Mr. Trump’s disclosure of sensitive intel to the Russians—and whatever the particulars of the incident, the danger is that Presidencies can withstand only so much turbulence before they come apart.

The Washington Post reported Monday night that in an Oval Office meeting last week Mr. Trump relayed high-level “code word” classified material obtained from an ally to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Cue another Washington meltdown. The President took to Twitter on Tuesday morning to defend himself, claiming an “absolute right” to disclose “facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety.”

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster put a finer point on it at a Tuesday press conference, though without denying key details. He said Mr. Trump’s disclosure was “wholly appropriate” and didn’t expose intelligence sources and methods.

Presidents sometimes share secrets with overseas leaders—even to adversaries such as the Soviets during the Cold War—if they conclude the benefits of showing what the U.S. knows will aid diplomacy or strategic interests. From media accounts and his tweets, Mr. Trump said something about Islamic State’s laptop bomb threat to airlines. He may well have been trying to convince the envoys of the menace ISIS poses to Russian lives and foreign-policy goals, like the Russian airliner that exploded over Sinai in 2015.

Then again, the Post story has Mr. Trump boasting about how great U.S. intelligence is and divulging the info on impulse to prove it. National security officials also asked the reporters to withhold specifics about the item in question, presumably because further disclosure could undermine efforts to counter the threat or endanger the lives of human assets.

Reports emerged on Tuesday that the ally that gathered the material is Israel, and the revelation could endanger this and other intelligence-sharing relationships. The Israelis may hold back if they think their dossiers will be laundered through the U.S. to the Russians and then get passed to their Iranian and Syrian clients, and other foreign services may lose confidence in the U.S.

Lt. Gen. McMaster said he disputed “the premise” of the Post story, which was that Mr. Trump had done something wrong or unbecoming. He confirmed that Mr. Trump made the decision ad hoc “in the context of the conversation,” not before the meeting. The problem is that even if the President’s conduct was “wholly appropriate,” the story’s premise is wholly plausible.

The Israeli government was the source of the classified intelligence that President Trump shared with a pair of Russian officials in a meeting last week, multiple reports said Tuesday,

Citing a former official with knowledge of the matter, NBC News reported that Trump’s information came from America’s longstanding Mideast ally.

Trump and his national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, both defended his discussion with the Russians, saying that nothing inappropriate had been revealed.

McMaster said the president wasn’t aware where the information about ISIS threats to airliners originated or how it was gathered.

“The president wasn’t even aware where this information came from. He wasn’t briefed on the source or method of the information either,” said McMaster, who was in the Oval Office meeting with Trump and Russia’s ambassador and foreign minister.

He would not say whether the information Trump shared was classified, and offered a broad defense of the president during a White House press briefing.

The US Army general also slammed the Washington Post, which first reported the story in which sources alleged that Trump had endangered a foreign source by revealing the information.

“The premise of that article is false that in any way the president had a conversation that was inappropriate or that resulted in any kind of lapse in national security,” McMaster said.

“In the context of that discussion, what the president discussed with the foreign minister was wholly appropriate to that conversation and is consistent with the routine sharing of information between the president and any leaders with whom he’s engaged.”

There was no decision made in advance to release the information, he said. The president, he added, brought it up during the course of the conversation.

The White House alerted the NSA and CIA about the disclosure “out of an abundance of caution.”

McMaster said the “real issue” was that “our national security has been put at risk by those violating confidentiality and those releasing information to the press.”

Trump took to Twitter to defend himself over the sitdown with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

“As President I wanted to share with Russia (at an openly scheduled W.H. meeting) which I have the absolute right to do, facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety. Humanitarian reasons, plus I want Russia to greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism,” he wrote before going after the leaks himself.

“I have been asking Director Comey & others, from the beginning of my administration, to find the LEAKERS in the intelligence community,” he griped.

Later Tuesday, CIA Director Mike Pompeo was set to brief the House Intelligence Committee about assorted issues involving Russia, including Trump’s disclosure.

Lawmakers quickly reacted, with Democrats slamming Trump and even some Republicans questioning his judgment.

For Democrats, there is nothing like having the media and the intelligence bureaucracy on the team.

We don’t know all the details, but let’s stipulate that if President Trump disclosed to Russian diplomats secret information that was shared with the U.S. by a foreign intelligence service, as the Washington Post alleges, that could have been a reckless thing to do. General H. R. McMaster, the president’s national-security adviser, claims the Post’s story is not true; but there has been pushback from critics who say that McMaster’s denial was lawyerly.

The matter boils down to whether Trump disclosed a city in Islamic State territory from which an allied intelligence service (perhaps through a source who infiltrated ISIS, or through a collection method that enabled intelligence to penetrate ISIS operations) discovered a threat to civil aviation (reportedly involving explosives hidden in laptop computers). In asserting that the report is “false,” McMaster insisted that Trump had not “disclosed” any “intelligence sources or methods” or “military operations that were not already publicly known.” That denial, however, arguably sidesteps what the Post actually reports. The paper claims not that Trump provided the identity of the source or the nature of the intelligence method involved but that the president mentioned a city that is the locus of the information. By saying Trump did not “disclose” the source, is McMaster saying there’s no way that what was revealed could compromise the source?

It is reasonably argued that this tip could enable to Russians to figure out which ISIS cell has been infiltrated, thereby endangering the mole or other penetration method. It is also reasonably argued, though, that the Post’s own reporting of what McMaster describes as a standard diplomatic exchange of sensitive intelligence has given the Islamic State valuable information it would not otherwise have learned.

In any event, without going into details: Trump concedes that he discussed “facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety”; and the Post maintains that it was persuaded by “officials” (not further identified) to withhold from its report the name of the city, lest “important intelligence capabilities” be jeopardized. If knowledgeable government officials did plead with the Post to refrain from reporting these details, that would be cause for concern that the president erred, perhaps significantly.

Trump’s disclosure was certainly not illegal. The president is in charge of classified information. He has unreviewable authority to disclose it himself and to authorize executive-branch subordinates to disclose it. But legality (as Jim Geraghty explains in the “Morning Jolt”) is not the point. The question is competence: Was the president trying to impress the Russians with his range of intelligence knowledge, even though the Russians would naturally assume an American president knew such things? If so, the incident would raise questions about Trump’s conduct of foreign policy. Avoidable gaffes can gravely imperil intelligence sources. The doubts they can create about our government’s reliability in keeping secrets may induce allied intelligence services to withhold vital information from us. And avoidable gaffes can happen to an official who is not well versed in the give-and-take of high-level diplomatic exchanges. That would not be an excuse: President of the United States is not an entry-level position.

All that said, how unusual is this sort of thing, really? It is a good question that Steve Hayward raises at Power Line — along with a Washington Post report reminding us that, less than a year ago, the Obama administration was offering to share with Russia intelligence about ISIS operations in Syria . . . which sounds an awful lot like what Trump was doing.

Listening from Budapest to the Washington debate on whether President Trump leaked intelligence secrets to the Russians in a White House meeting attended by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, as alleged in a Washington Post report, I’m struck by the extraordinary number of people who have been jumping to conclusions — as from an ideological circus’s trampoline while also performing somersaults — in the discussions.

Jonah is an experienced performer on the trampoline when he’s in the mood, but I’m starting with his most recent commentary — because he’s not in that mood on this occasion. In fact, his is the most sober and persuasive analysis so far of what happened and why from a Trump-skeptic standpoint, though that’s not as flattering a compliment as I would like it to be.

The “why” is important — and Jonah raises it by asking if the Post story is “plausible.” He concludes rightly that it is because Trump has shown on a number of occasions that he is boastful, impulsive, and anxious to display his mastery of affairs. And what better occasion to do this than when he is seeking to impress the Russians — an adversary he apparently wishes to win round — by claiming that he has lots of good intelligence that would help them if they were willing to join the U.S. in a fight against their common enemies, ISIS and terrorism?

Might Trump have gone too far in describing just how much he knew and how U.S. intelligence services had acquired the information? Of course, from what we know of the president, he very well might have done. That’s why the report is plausible. And the credibility of Jonah’s argument is enhanced by the fact that he stops there, dismissing as “resistance paranoia” the idea that Trump was engaged in some sort of treasonous covert operation for the Kremlin. Again, rightly so.

Now, we come to the question. Okay, so the Post report is plausible. Is it true? And here Jonah and others have to confront the firm and outright denials the report has received from the three leading U.S. national-security officials. These denials — they appear below — both flatly deny the overall story and dismiss particular points in it. It’s therefore elicited from skeptics two responses: that they don’t clear up the many unanswered questions that the story raises and that therefore the denials, though sweeping, may well be (or for some people, probably are) carefully worded lawyerly evasions.

Jonah raises a reasonable version of the first response and asks four questions about, in particular, the most comprehensive denial from National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster: “Why not take any questions? Why not address the details of the story? Why deny things not alleged? Why did intelligence officials urge the Post to withhold key details if this is ‘fake news’?”

My off-the-cuff replies are: (a) to avoid complicating the clear denial with endless extraneous points; (b) see previous reply; (c) to forestall criticisms that he hadn’t addressed obvious points; and (d) because the Post sources were wrong in saying that Trump had revealed these things but these things were nonetheless intelligence secrets they wanted kept secret. Admittedly, my replies to Jonah’s questions are highly speculative, but that’s because neither of us know for certain what the accurate answers are. I’m merely suggesting that there may be innocent answers to them.

I think we can be more confident, however, in rejecting the criticism that the final words of McMaster’s denial — “I was in the room. It didn’t happen.” — were a lawyerly evasion. Admittedly, in the post-Watergate era, journalists have got used to playing linguistic philosophers when parsing political statements. The simplest technique on these lines is to ask: “Well, that’s what he said; but what didn’t he say?” It’s a useful technique for keeping a story alive, moreover, because it sometimes seems as if there is an infinite number of things he didn’t say.

But we shouldn’t confuse logical possibilities with political realities. As a practical political matter, McMaster has said that the story is false, there’s nothing in it, and Trump didn’t reveal intelligence secrets to the Russians. You can’t spin “I was in the room. It didn’t happen.” into a denial of something far less than that. If it turns out Trump did reveal intelligence secrets to the Russians, then McMaster will have lied to the country and his resignation will be just a matter of time — as also that of his two fellow-deniers, Dina Powell and Rex Tillerson.

Late-breaking new, however! According to half the reporters and commentators in Washington, Trump has admitted exactly that and revealed his subordinates to be lying gamely on his behalf. Trump today tweeted in two linked tweets as follows:

“As President I wanted to share with Russia (at an openly scheduled W.H. meeting) which I have the absolute right to do, facts pertaining…. …to terrorism and airline flight safety. Humanitarian reasons, plus I want Russia to greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism.”