WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday continued to provide a muddled explanation of reports that Trump shared classified information with Russian officials in an Oval Office meeting last week.
National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, who had said on Monday that The Washington Post’s reporting was false, would not directly confirm or deny that Trump had shared classified information.
‘We don’t say what’s classified, what’s not classified,” McMaster said at a press briefing Tuesday, before adding that “what the president shared was wholly appropriate.”
Trump all but confirmed that he did share classified information in a series of tweets early Tuesday morning, proclaiming that he has “the absolute right” to share any information he wants.
In McMaster’s effort to clear up the discrepancies between his previous attempt to deny the Post’s report, which was quickly confirmed by several other media outlets, and Trump’s confirmation of it, McMaster still maintained that “the premise of that article is false.”
Yet McMaster himself seemed to confirm major parts of the story during Tuesday’s contentious briefing. He suggested that Trump did not know the source of the information when revealing it.
“The president wasn’t even aware of where this information came from,” McMaster said. “He wasn’t briefed on the source of information either.”
The Post reported that Trump’s disclosure “jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.”
“I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day,” Trump boasted at last week’s meeting with the Russians, according to an official with knowledge of the meeting.
Despite the grave national security implications, McMaster insisted on Tuesday that the real problem was leaks to reporters, which Trump and other White House officials have also tried to argue.
Trump’s meeting last week came one day after he abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey, who had been investigating ties between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian officials. That meeting was closed to American reporters, although members of Russian state media were given access.
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