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Yes, he screwed the pooch. Bigly.

Published by digby on November 24, 2017

Yes, he screwed the pooch. Bigly.by digby
I wrote yesterday about Vanity Fair’s big story this week giving details of “May 10 meeting in the Oval Office where the president betrayed his intelligence community by leaking the content of a classified, and highly sensitive, Israeli intelligence operation to two high-ranking Russian envoys, Sergey Kislyak and Sergey Lavrov.”
This was the original story from last May in the Washington 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 that Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State. 

The information Trump relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said. 

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said that Trump’s decision to do so risks 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 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.”

Recall that this was the unannounced meeting with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister held the morning after he fired Comey and which he only allowed the Russian press to attend. That was the meeting where he told them he’d fired Comey because he was a “nut job” and that now the pressure was off of him about Russia. 

Seriously people, what would he have to do to make Republicans think there might be something odd going on with Trump and Russia?

Josh Marshall notes the Vanity Fair piece and adds:

We’re seeing a lot of coverage today of reports that US intelligence officials warned their Israeli counterparts to be careful sharing information with Donald Trump because he might be compromised by the Russians. This is not new information. Indeed, it is an example of just how much and how early we’ve known about the crisis in the White House, with still relatively little attention being given to the fact of it. 

This news was first reported in January in the Israeli press – and not just in the Israeli press but in the English language Israeli press, so readily accessible in the United States. Indeed, a number of publications including TPM picked up this news at the time. Here’s a January 13th post of mine excerpting a key passage from the English language version of Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth. The unnamed top US intelligence official told his Israeli intelligence counterparts that Vladimir Putin had ‘leverages of pressure’ over then President-Elect Trump and that they should be cautious giving him or those working for him sensitive intelligence because it might end up in the hands of the Iranians.

He also notes that everything points to Trump being blackmailed. It does. Or at least to the fact that Trump believes he could be blackmailed.

Recall this weird moment:

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