Donald Trump shares classified information with Russia

House Democrats are moving to impeach President Donald Trump for pressuring Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 presidential election partly in exchange for a White House meeting. Ukraine’s leaders ultimately chose not to interfere, and they didn’t get that White House meeting.

But in just a few hours, Trump will bestow the honor of a White House meeting on Russia — a country that actually did interfere in a US presidential election.

Two years ago, the US removed a spy from Russia who had access to the highest levels of the Kremlin over concerns for his safety — and that President Donald Trump might endanger him further.

In a stunning Monday morning report, CNN’s Jim Sciutto detailed how US intelligence officials were so worried that Trump might accidentally expose the covert asset’s identity that they launched a secret mission to extract him from Russia in 2017.

“The Russian investigation isn’t a witch hunt anymore, if it ever was. It’s a national necessity.”

Those aren’t the words of a liberal reacting to this week’s bombshell release of emails showing that Donald Trump Jr. took a meeting with a Russian lawyer after being explicitly told it would include damaging information about Hillary Clinton that was being provided by the Russian government.

President Donald Trump arrived in Israel this morning to face a skeptical nation. After all, last week he had apparently undermined a crucial Israeli intelligence asset embedded in ISIS territory by passing highly sensitive Israeli intelligence to the Russian foreign minister in the Oval Office.

Israel has refused to confirm or deny that Trump’s disclosure involved Israeli intelligence, as is standard practice; confirming it would just make it worse.

“This is code-word information,” an anonymous US official told the Washington Post. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

Even in these extraordinary times, news of President Trump’s impromptu disclosure of “code-word information” to the Oval Office’s recent Russian guests shocked me. As someone who has served our country in uniform, I was alarmed by the idea of a commander in chief who, despite railing against mutinous leakers, possesses no sense of prudence in his own handling of America’s secrets  —  even when in the company of our geopolitical adversaries.

Impeachment of an American president is a weighty measure that’s only been used a handful of times in our history. And on two of those occasions, the judgment of history has come down against the impeachers.

Andrew Johnson was an awful president, but the move by Radical Republicans in Congress to remove him from office reeked from top to bottom of an effort to resolve a policy dispute by ginning up a legal one — passing a law to bar Johnson from firing Cabinet secretaries and them impeaching him for breaking it. Bill Clinton’s impeachment, if anything, suffered from the opposite problem. The charges against him, even if you believed them, simply seemed to have too little to do with the duties and responsibilities of his high office. Republicans had hoped a sex scandal would damage Clinton’s approval ratings, it didn’t really, and then they went berserk.

The Russia investigation got real this week. Anyone who works in the White House should be nervous — and it looks like they are.

Here’s what we learned this week about Donald Trump’s Russia problems: Trump, it turns out, had a conversation with some Russian officials in the Oval Office last week where he said two of the worst things he probably could. First, he told them he was feeling much better about the Russia investigation since he dumped his FBI director, James Comey, who was overseeing it. Second, he spilled highly classified information about ISIS, provided to the U.S. by Israel. It’s unclear how that conversation could possibly have gone worse.

At the end of a week full of big Trump-Russia news, the Washington Post dropped yet another bombshell, reporting on Friday that a current “senior White House adviser” is a “significant person of interest” in the law enforcement investigation into potential Trump campaign collusion with Russia. That’s fancy talk for “potential suspect.”

This is a first. So far, all of the names who have been publicly identified as persons of interest in this investigation were out of government: former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page, and political strategist Roger Stone.

Spies in the movies and on TV are one-man (or woman) bands. They parachute in, do some dramatic stuff, and get the goods all by themselves.

But in real-life spying, especially the counterterrorism kind, that’s not how things work. When it comes to the fight against ISIS, the US relies heavily on information from deep-cover agents from countries like Turkey, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel.

In just a few short months, Donald Trump has already damaged his relationship with Israel so badly that what should have been a victory lap through one of America’s closest allies will instead be a march through a minefield of the president’s own making.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When Trump chose to include Israel among his first foreign destinations, he surely assumed Jerusalem would be the easiest leg of a grueling nine-day, multi-country foreign sweep: the fulfillment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s deepest desires with the arrival of a sympathetic-minded Republican president, a chance for an easy Trump administration win, and a celebration of shared vision.

The Justice Department has appointed a special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the president election, according to multiple news reports.

Former FBI Director Robert Mueller, nominated by George W. Bush in 2001 and reappointed by Barack Obama in 2011, will oversee the probe into “the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election,” according to a copy of the order posted by BuzzFeed.

Every stunning decision, discomfiting revelation, and inexplicable comment from President Donald Trump is leaving congressional Republicans increasingly anxious, bewildered, and fuming.

After the turbulent 2016 campaign, most Republicans were willing at the start of the year to set aside any uneasiness about the uncensored celebrity president to pursue their goals of repealing Obamacare, cutting taxes, and disassembling the regulatory state. They made excuses for or tried to ignore the scandal-ridden administration as long as it meant a unified Republican government could legislate.

Russian President Vladimir Putin loves to troll the United States. But he took it to new heights during a press conference in Sochi, Russia, on Wednesday morning.

In the midst of the raging controversies in Washington over the James Comey memo and Trump’s disclosure of sensitive intelligence on ISIS in an Oval Office meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Putin offered to provide a transcript of the controversial Trump-Lavrov meeting: “If the US administration finds it necessary, we are ready to provide the record of the conversation between Trump and Lavrov to the Senate and Congress.”

When Donald Trump revealed highly sensitive information to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the Oval Office, he directly endangered the life of an Israeli spy living under deep cover in ISIS territory, ABC News reported last night.

This was the embodiment of Israel’s worst fears. Even before Donald Trump took office, the Israeli intelligence community had quietly expressed concern that information shared with the administration might make its way to Russia and then, through Moscow, to Iran, Israel’s biggest adversary in the region.

Nixon historians. Reporters. Democrats. Talking heads. They’ve all said the W-word. Now a Republican has dropped it too.

At an event on Tuesday night, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said that Donald Trump’s scandals are “reaching Watergate size and scale.”

When the Washington Post revealed late Monday afternoon that President Trump had casually disclosed highly classified intelligence to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office, the words that immediately began to buzz around Washington were shocking and unprecedented. Such a disclosure, it seemed, had no historical corollary.

But that’s not exactly true: Presidents have a long history of sharing intelligence information with allies, as well as with the American people. John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, among others, all chose to divulge critical intelligence information at some point during their presidencies.

At least since Donald Trump first announced his presidential campaign in June 2015, journalists and activists have been asking: Is this the scandal that finally does him in?

Would his casual description of Mexican immigrants as rapists in his announcement speech force him to drop out shortly after he jumped in? Would his attack on John McCain for being captured in Vietnam end his campaign? What about mocking a disabled New York Times reporter? Or lying and saying Muslim Americans in Jersey City celebrated the 9/11 attacks? Or proposing an all-out ban on Muslim immigration?

Republican lawmakers are stuck in the same Donald Trump cycle they’ve come to know too well.

They are in the middle of yet another White House scandal; President Trump reportedly revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister last week, and his administration can’t get the story straight on whether or not it even happened.

It’s a startling reality of the current White House: You can’t believe anything President Donald Trump and his staff say.

The latest example came this week — after a Washington Post report on Monday found that Trump had leaked highly classified information about ISIS during a meeting with Russian officials. Reportedly, the gaffe came because Trump was bragging about the quality of his intelligence. “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day,” he reportedly said.

President Donald Trump might have leaked classified information to the Russian government, the Washington Post reported Monday, and for perhaps the first time in his scandal-soaked presidency, Republicans on Capitol Hill did not immediately rise to his defense.

On Tuesday morning, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had only commented on how the “drama” from this report would slow down the Republican conference’s packed legislative agenda on Capitol Hill.

The Washington Post’s bombshell report that President Donald Trump revealed highly classified intelligence to the Russian foreign minister during his visit last week is a lot of “drama,” according Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

And Congress could do with “less drama” from the White House, McConnell said on Bloomberg TV Tuesday morning:

Just after 5 pm on Monday, the Washington Post released a bombshell report alleging that President Donald Trump shared an ally’s “highly classified” information with Russian officials at the White House last week. By 6 pm, Fox News had assembled an “all-star panel” to run the Post’s story through the wringer of right-wing skepticism.

Intentionally or not, it became a master class on political spin.

Last month, President Donald Trump shared classified intelligence about ISIS with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a meeting in the Oval Office.

For Glenn Carle, a 23-year veteran of the CIA and former deputy officer on the National Intelligence Council, this report fits into a concerning pattern he’s witnessed in the president.

Today we are facing the very real possibility that the president of the United States poses a clear and present danger to American national security.

That’s the inescapable conclusion from the Washington Post’s bombshell report that Trump shared highly sensitive, highly classified information about the ISIS fight with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak when the men met with Trump in the Oval Office last week.

The Washington Post’s blockbuster story that Trump leaked “code-word information,” per a US official, using terminology to indicate the highly sensitive intelligence, is rocking Washington.

The administration is scrambling to defend the Post’s reporting, hastily sending out National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster to provide a very brief press conference.