Whoops! I did it again. (Chris Kleponis-Pool/Getty Images)

Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian diplomats

President Donald Trump disclosed “highly classified information” during a meeting with Russian officials last week, according to The Washington Post. 

• The details had not even been shared with American allies, and the disclosure could jeopardize a crucial intelligence-sharing relationship.

The revelations raise new questions about the already controversial meeting of Trump, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak, who is the Russian ambassador to the U.S. While such a disclosure is likely not illegal, it raises concerns about both the consequences of Trump’s ad hoc style when interacting with foreign leaders and U.S. coordination with other nations on sensitive foreign policy issues.

The president’s disclosures to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in their Oval Office meeting last week jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State — an information-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, current and former U.S. officials said. Trump appeared to be boasting of the “great intel” he receives when he described a looming terror threat, according to an official with knowledge of the exchange.
Trump told Foreign Minister  Lavrov and Ambassador  Kislyak details about an ISIS terrorist plots involving laptops on airplanes, and gave away the city in ISIS territory where a US intel-sharing ally found out about the threat.

resident Trump met with Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, in the White House last week. American journalists were barred, but Russia released photographs. CreditRussian Foreign Ministry

"Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States learned only through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence-gathering method, but he described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State's territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.

"The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump's decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump's meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.

" 'This is code-word information,' said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump 'revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.' "

So this is not intelligence that the United States gathered or owned. It wasn't up to the United States to share. And so doing so really jeopardizes that relationship. It potentially damages trust that's critical in these kinds of arrangements. And I think that's one of the really big worries here...And in this case it's important, because this is apparently an ongoing stream of intelligence into Islamic state plotting. I mean, what could be more important?"

National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster called the Washington Post story 'false', which claimed Trump leaked 'highly classified' information to the Russians during an Oval Office meeting last week

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4509414/Republicans-speak-latest-Trump-reports.html#ixzz4hDdrJ0Qc
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VOX

• This revelation by the Post comes after a week of speculation and concern over Trump’s willingness to allow a Russian state media photographer into the Oval Office as part of the visit. Counterintelligence experts said that was a needless security breach that could’ve let the photographer, a Russian government employee, install a listening device or other surveillance gear in the White House. [Washington Post / Carol Morello and Greg Miller]
• But it appears the more imminent security risk was just Trump running his mouth.
• How bad is this? In the words of national security law expert Benjamin Wittes: “This story is nauseating. You might have to work with natsec people to understand how bad it is, but it's horrible. Really really bad.” [Benjamin Wittes,Senior Fellow at Brookings. Editor in Chief: Lawfare  ]
• So is this all evidence of US-Russian collusion? Maybe, but again, the Post story suggests that maybe Trump is just extremely insecure and wanted to impress his guests. He reportedly told Lavrov and Kislyak, “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day.”
• And we can’t say we didn’t see this coming. Here's a Politico story from the day after inauguration, on intelligence community worries about Trump leaking to Russia: "Trump’s off-the-cuff communication style also alarms observers in the U.S. and abroad who worry he may, inadvertently or out of bravado, reveal classified information." [Politico / Nahal Toosi​]

The latest reports of Trump revealing classified information to the Russians comes just ahead of his first foreign trip as president. He's set to depart on Friday, traveling to Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican,..and will attend a NATO meeting in Brussels, Belgium, and the G7 meeting in Italy.

"The Washington Post is withholding most plot details, including the name of the city, at the urging of officials who warned that revealing them would jeopardize important intelligence capability

Bob Corker, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, was one of the first Republicans to speak out about reports Trump shared classified information with Russia

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4509414/Republicans-speak-latest-Trump-reports.html#ixzz4hDdPM7vK
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Lawmakers express shock, concern about Oval Office disclosure.

The disclosure is likely to raise questions about the president’s handling of classified information and could also increase pressure on investigators looking into his possible ties to the Kremlin. “The chaos” in the administration “creates a worrisome environment,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

Where Bashar al-Assad burns the people he kills

State Department/DigitalGlobe via AP

• In a press briefing Monday, acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Stuart Jones — a career foreign service officer who's served as ambassador to Iraq and Jordan — presented newly declassified satellite evidence suggesting that the Syrian government has built a crematorium to dispose of bodies at its notorious Saydnaya prison complex, outside Damascus. [NYT / Gardiner Harris and Anne Barnard]
• If Saydnaya sounds familiar, that’s probably due to a February report from Amnesty International that estimated that anywhere from 5,000 to 13,000 people have been executed there since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011. Deaths due to disease or malnutrition were common, and guards torture inmates by withholding water, beating them with electrical cables and belts made of cut-up tank tracks, and forcing prisoners to rape each other. Prisoners are typically executed by hanging, after being blindfolded and told they’re going to a “good place.” [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]
• The Amnesty report said that the prison facility was enlarged in 2012 to enable more executions. "Our data … suggests as many as 50 murders a day coming out of the complex," the State Department's Jones told reporters. "If you have that level of production of mass murder, then using the crematorium would help." The photos released by State show the addition of HVAC facilities, a discharge stack, and other changes that suggest a crematorium has been constructed. [State Department / Stuart Jones]
• Jones further specified that he thinks the crematorium is a way to destroy evidence of the Syrian government’s crimes: “We believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Saydnaya prison.”
• Jones’s remarks included a specific call-out to Russia, the Syrian government’s main foreign backer, calling on it to “exercise its great influence over the Syrian regime” to stop the mass murders at Saydnaya. [Washington Post / Karen DeYoung]
• The timing of the revelation is also important: Tomorrow, indirect peace talks between the Syrian government and opposition start up again in Geneva, and Jones is the highest-ranking American official involved in the details of the Syrian peace process. The Assad government has downplayed the Geneva talks in favor of a parallel process in Kazakhstan with Russia, Turkey, and Iran, to negotiate local ceasefire zones. Jones has been an observer for some of those talks too. [The Guardian / Julian Borger​]

GET ME ROGER STONE

VARIETY

Nicolas Ortega

Political chaos in Washington is a return on investment for Moscow

President Trump’s decision to fire James Comey as FBI director was the latest destabilizing jolt to a core institution of the U.S. government that current and former officials say serves broader Russian interests. While the Kremlin may have hoped for sanctions relief and recognition of its annexation of Crimea from the Trump administration, the tumult in the United States is a welcome alternative.

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Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, 

CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times

Top lawmakers: If Trump has tapes, Congress needs access to them

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer were among leaders in both parties requesting that any recordings of White House conversations be turned over for review immediately. Sen. Mike Lee, a former federal prosecutor, said “it’s probably inevitable” that such tapes would be subpoenaed.

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President Trump’s signature on an executive order. CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times

Under Trump, inconvenient data that was previously public is being sidelined

Workplace violations, climate data, animal welfare and ethics records are among the types of information that has been obscured. In some cases, data that was once easily accessible has moved to locations that are harder to find, while others have entirely vanished.

The administration has deleted or tucked away important information, removed Obama-era webpages and broken with precedent by refusing to disclose even basic public information when it does not help advance Trump's agenda. Juliet Eilperin rounds up some of the startling assaults on transparency:

• Some of the moves lessen public access to information about companies and other employers – shielding them from the so-called “naming and shaming” that federal officials previously used to influence company behavior. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration dramatically scaled back on publicizing fines against firms. The Agriculture Department removed from the web a list of animal welfare enforcement actions, which listed abuses in dog breeding operations and horse farms.
• 
  
• The administration no longer publishes ethics waivers granted to employees who would otherwise be barred from joining the government because of lobbying activities. Nor is the White House releasing its visitor logs.
• 
  
• They've removed websites and other material supporting Obama-era policies – such as a White House web page directing prospective donors to private groups that aid Syrian refugees, and websites providing information about climate change.
• 
  
• Officials removed websites run by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department that provided scientific information about climate change, eliminating access, for instance, to documents evaluating the danger that the desert ecology in the Southwest could face from future warming.
• 
  
• The White House also retired the two-year-old Federal Supplier Greenhouse Gas Management Scorecard, which ranks firms with major federal contracts on their energy efficiency and policies to curb carbon output.

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United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley delivers remarks at a Security Council meeting in April. (Stephanie Keith/Reuters

Launching missiles is not the path to talks with the U.S., Haley tells Pyongyang

 The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations commented after analysts said North Korea appeared to have tested a new kind of missile with a longer range.

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Schumer: Special Counsel Needed Before Senate Confirms New FBI Director

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Sunday that the upper chamber should not vote to confirm a new FBI director until the Department of Justice appoints a special counsel to oversee the investigation into possible collusion between Trump associates and Russian operatives. “I think there are a lot of Democrats who feel that way,” Schumer said on CNN’s State of the Union. “We’ll have to discuss it as a caucus, but I would support that move.” Republican congressional leaders have pushed back at the suggestion of a special counsel, while Democrats have said it is necessary after President Donald Trump abruptly fired James Comey. Schumer added that Trump’s nominee to replace Comey should be nonpartisan and have prosecutorial experience. “If there is interference, or attempted interference, to shut down the investigation, to misdirect it—you need somebody who’s going to stand up,” Schumer said.

—Andrew Desiderio

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Russia, a Victim of the Cyberattack, Voices Outrage

By ANDREW E. KRAMER 4:55 PM ET

The country was hit the hardest in the first wave of a global hacking effort, with banks, cellphone operators and railroads fending off attacks.

With North Korea, we do have cards to play.

With North Korea, we do have cards to play.
DAILY BEAST


WASHINGTON POST

Nearly 100 Countries Hit in Massive Cyberattack.

DAILY BEAST

THE COMEY FIRING DAY FOUR: THE BEAT GOES ON.

Donald Trump walks across the South Lawn at the White House. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Is Trump taping conversations at the White House?

Friday morning, President Trump took to Twitter to launch a series of bizarre complaints — beginning with the allegation that the entire Russia issue was fabricated, veering into threats to cancel the White House press briefing, and culminating with a claim that he had secret “tapes” of his conversations with fired FBI Director James Comey.

All in all, it was a worrying series of statements from the president at a time of national crisis.

The White House later refused to say whether the president tapes his visitors.

• Comey, for one, probably does hope there are tapes, a source close to him told NBC. [Katy Turner / Twitter]

In White House Press Briefings, No Degree of Accuracy Required

By JIM RUTENBERG

President Trump has given his press team a “say anything” hall pass, leaving many to wonder what happens to a nation once a president drops even the pretense of accuracy.

WASHINGTON POST




-- Irate about the wall-to-wall coverage of the contradictions and inconsistencies in his and his staff’s evolving statements, the president also threatened this morning to cancel the daily press briefings: 



The biggest news out of Donald Trump’s Thursday interview with NBC was his confession that the Russia investigation was on his mind when he fired FBI director James Comey. Undercutting 48 hours of denials by his aides, the president said: “In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’”

 Legal experts and DOJ veterans, meanwhile, express doubts about Trump’s account of his conversation with Comey, Devlin Barrett and Philip Rucker report on the front page of The Post. “I just can’t even begin to think about that comment being true,” said Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland who previously worked in the Justice Department. “It defies belief in general because of the practices of not commenting on investigations, and it would especially defy belief in the case of Comey, who prides himself on strict observance of propriety.” Greenberger noted....

...a senior FBI official also said Comey would never have told the president he was not under investigation. "He tried to stay away from it [the Russian-ties investigation]," the official, who worked closely with Comey and keeps in touch with him, per Ken Dilanian and Pete Williams. "He would say, 'Look sir, I really can't get into it, and you don't want me to.'"


Getty

Trump’s tweets this morning will dramatically ratchet up the pressure on Comey to testify before Congress so that he can sort all this out, as well as clear his name. If he does not rebut the president’s version of events, Comey’s legacy will suffer. Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) have invited Comey to address the Senate Intelligence Committee next Tuesday, but he still has not responded.  [ P.S.: Comey will not appear in a closed session before the Senate Intelligence Committee... Warner announced that Comey would not be appearing before his panel in an interview on MSNBC Friday--Politico

-- Even if Comey said what Trump claims, Eugene Robinson notes that typical investigative procedure is to start at the bottom of an organization and work your way up: “‘You are not under investigation’ does not mean ‘you will never be under investigation.’”

-- There’s another question also worth considering: If the focus of an investigation asks an FBI agent whether he or she is under investigation, does the agent have to tell the truth? “I was a criminal investigator for years, and if someone had asked me if they were under investigation and they were under investigation, I would have said no,” Dana Ridenour, who spent 21 years with the FBI as a special agent, told Philip Bump. The reason was simple: She wouldn’t want to tip off the target of the investigation. “As a criminal investigator,” she said, “I don’t know of any reason I would have to disclose to somebody that they were under investigation.”

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Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe prepares to testify during the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on worldwide threats on Thursday.

Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images

 ...testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday, acting FBI director Andrew McCabe directly rejected the White House’s characterization of the Russian probe as a low priority and delivered a passionate defense of Comey. From Matt Zapotosky and Karoun Demirjian: “McCabe, who had been the No. 2 official in the FBI until President Trump fired Comey this week, said that the bureau considered the probe of possible coordination between the Kremlin and the Trump team during the 2016 election campaign a ‘highly significant investigation’

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-- This story is likely to dominate the news at least through next week.

• ... Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — whose pre-Comey reputation as an apolitical straight shooter has been seriously tarnished, at the very least, since he wrote the memo initially used to justify the FBI director’s firing — is going to brief the full Senate next week. It may not surprise you that Senate Democrats have a lot of questions for him. [Washington Post / Ed O’Keefe and Paul Kane]

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-- Trump’s admission that the Russia investigation weighed heavily on his deliberations about firing Comey will also create new headaches for Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions, who admittedly consulted with the president as he made the decision, recused himself from the Russia probe and all matters relating to the 2016 campaign, including the investigation into Clinton’s server.

“Refusing to recuse oneself from a conflict or breaking the promise to recuse from a conflict is a serious breach of legal ethics,” conservative Post blogger Jennifer Rubin writes.

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Michael Gerson, a former top speechwriter for George W. Bush, writes in his column that “all of this is consistent with — even mandated by — Trump’s contempt for institutions”: “This was always the main question: Would President Trump go beyond mere Twitter abuse and move against institutions that limit his power? By any reasonable standard, we now have an answer. … He has called the FBI investigation process ‘rigged.’ If the system is dirty, only a fool would not play by the same rules. This is the logic of conspiratorial disdain for government. An independent, nonpolitical FBI? What a joke. It is all political. And politics is power. And power is making people do what you want, or destroying those who get in your way. The gospel according to Nixon…

“It is dangerous to have a leader with disdain for the law. It is also dangerous to have a leader who believes that anything legal is permissible,” Gerson adds. “Trump’s firing of Comey was legal. It also violated a democratic norm — a proper presidential deference for an ongoing investigation and the independence of law enforcement. There is no evidence that such considerations even occur to Trump. In their place: What kind of sucker would not press all his advantages? ...

- Charles Krauthammer thinks Comey probably needed to go, but the conservative columnist believes Trump could easily have arranged for him to gracefully step aside: “Instead we got this — a political ax murder, brutal even by Washington standards....If Trump thought this would kill the (Russia) inquiry and the story, or perhaps even just derail it somewhat, he’s made the blunder of the decade. Whacking Comey has brought more critical attention to the Russia story than anything imaginable. … So why did he do it? Now we know: The king asked whether no one would rid him of this troublesome priest, and got so impatient he did it himself.”

 A few hours after Trump fired Comey, a prominent Republican politician gave David Ignatius this blunt assessment....The Trump presidency is a test. We’ll find out how strong our institutions are and, even more, whether this generation of leaders is worthy of our Founding Fathers. So far, the evidence is mixed.”

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 Inside the West Wing, the mood right now is dour. From Politico: “Several White House officials said aides who didn’t need to see the president stayed away from the Oval Office — and kept their doors closed. … Trump did the lengthy interview with Holt even though some on his staff believed it was a bad idea and gave his answers off-the-cuff. One person who spoke to him said he’d been ‘fixated’ on his news coverage and believed his press team was failing him and that he needed ‘to take the situation into his own hands.’ …

“The episode highlights two fundamental issues of the Trump presidency: It is often impossible to work for Trump in the White House — and it is often impossible for Trump to be happy with those who work for him. ...

“Another White House official said there is a ‘widespread recognition this was handled terribly but not a real sense that we can do much here.

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• Trump's lawyers say he received no income from Russia in the past decade, but added the now widely mocked caveat "with a few exceptions." 

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NEW YORK  has updated its great summary of the last three days that shook the nation: 

28 Reasons Trump’s Firing of James Comey Is a World-Historic Shit Show

28 Reasons Trump’s Firing of James Comey Is a World-Historic Shit Show

NEW YORK