This won’t come as a surprise, but Trump fucked up again. Last week, the day after the president fired James Comey, the tangerine nightmare that is now the leader of the free world met with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador. Then he reportedly revealed some highly classified information, putting not only our continued access to an important source in jeopardy, but also America’s efforts to fight ISIS at risk.
The situation between Trump and Russia was already very bad, but this latest development makes it much, much worse. According to The Washington Post, the source of the classified information was “an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State.” What’s even more unsettling is that, based on officials’ statements about the incident, Trump was “describing details about an Islamic State terror threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft” to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak—as well as their aides—without consulting anyone ahead of time. It honestly sounds like he started bragging and couldn’t keep the highly classified information to himself.
One of the Post’s sources claims that Trump told the Russian officials. “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day,”
“This is code-word information,” another unnamed United States official told the Post. “[Trump] revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”
That’s so fucking bad. So bad that apparently White House aides were frantically calling the CIA and the NSA right after the meeting to try and limit the scope of the damage. That’s fucking embarrassing for everyone! Let’s not forget that this happened a day after President Trump fired the head of the FBI, and the White House made it very clear that he did so in order to help everyone “move on” from the agency’s investigation into Trump, Russia, and election rigging. And then the next damn day, Trump meets with Russian officials and gives them classified information, apparently unprompted.
The Post goes on to explain that the information Trump reportedly shared included the specific city where the ISIS threat was identified, potentially enabling Russia to figure out what US ally collected the intelligence and how. On top of that, Trump apparently described “specific military operations in Iraq and Syria.” If you feel like you’re having a heart attack taking all this in, take slow deep breaths because it actually gets more infuriating from here.
It’s inevitably another case of Donald Trump’s destructive habit of hypocrisy. During his campaign, Trump just loved to yell about how bad it would be to reveal America’s secrets. Look at this tweet:
This was a constant attack Trump used on the campaign trail. He loved to exploit Clinton’s use of private email servers and exploit information revealed in the DNC hack as examples of how the Democrats couldn’t keep America’s secrets safe. As for the Republican leadership in Congress, the same message was very clear. Here’s a ringer from Paul Ryan:
What will the United Kingdom or Germany or Saudi Arabia think now that the President of the United States is now offering up classified information to Putin’s top lieutenants, apparently by accident?
It’s simple: They’ll think that the US is run by a reckless, dangerous buffoon who can’t be trusted to wipe his own ass without posing a risk to national security. And frankly, after last week and now this, they wouldn’t be wrong.