President Donald Trump said Tuesday he had an "absolute right" to share highly classified information from a U.S. ally about an ISIS terror threat with Russia.
Trump's tweets came the morning after top White House national security officials declared the story, which was first reported by the Washington Post, as false. The President shared the intelligence with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak on May 10.
Trump claimed on Twitter that, as president, "I wanted to share with Russia (at an openly scheduled W.H. meeting) which I have the absolute right to do, facts pertaining.... ... to terrorism and airline flight safety. Humanitarian reasons, plus I want Russia to greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism."
The Cipher Brief's Mackenzie Weinger spoke with Gen. Michael Hayden, former CIA and NSA Director, about Trump's defense of sharing classified information with the Russians, how it could impact intelligence sharing, and what message this sends to the Kremlin.
The Cipher Brief: Trump this morning declared he had an "absolute right" to share information with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador. He wrote on Twitter he shared with Russia "facts pertaining" to "terrorism and airline safety" for what he said were "humanitarian reasons, plus I want Russia to greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism." What is your reaction to Trump and those tweets seemingly confirming the Post’s story yesterday?
Michael Hayden: It’s quite remarkable. So you have the Post story, and then you have good people — [National Security Advisor] H.R. McMaster and [Deputy National Security Advisor] Dina Powell, both of whom I know and have great respect for — kind of go out there, and this could not have been comfortable for them. Go out there and issue what I think was fairly described as the non-denial denial, you know? They picked up the story that he never revealed sources and methods, which of course wasn’t the story. But, of course, in any event, there was a real effort on damage limitation on their part. As I said, I think that they were uncomfortable about that. They’re not the White House press office — they’re the national security advisor and the deputy national security advisor.
Now this morning, what you get from the president is not a non-denial denial, but simply a non-denial, period. As you suggest, he seems to admit that he told things to the Russians that were off-script but that were fully within his power to tell the Russians. I have to agree with the latter, they are fully within his power to tell the Russians, but the wisdom of doing it is something quite different.
Here, the issue is passing on information we had apparently gotten from another party. It’s a hard and fast rule within the intelligence profession that you do not pass information onto a third party without the permission of the original source of the information. If the Post story is in any way correct, that appears to have been disregarded in this instance.
Beyond that, I’m concerned about the style of the president in these kinds of meetings. These are usually pretty carefully scripted. There’s a lot of background material, it’s clear what the institutions of government believe should or should not be shared, should or should not be said. Now you’ve got a very inexperienced president that does not seem to have much humility in the face of that inexperience who’s quite willing to make his own instinctive, impulsive spur of the moment decisions about what it is he’s going to say. Frankly, that leads to the kind of circumstance that we’re dealing with right now where it appears that a lot of people in government were quite alarmed that he passed this information on to the Russian foreign minister.
There’s talk made that he didn’t reveal sources and methods, but I have to tell you, I used to argue with the press a lot when I was in government and the press would claim they were just revealing a fact of something. My point would be, you realize that in revealing that “fact of,” you are also pointing the way to the “fact how” in terms of how it was we derived that information. So I think that was the concern.
This is a final point I would make — I don’t think this is the “deep state” trying to hurt the president. I don’t think this is the bureaucracy trying to take vengeance. I think these are the people who are responsible for dealing with the consequences of these kinds of decisions expressing a real sense of alarm at these consequences.
TCB: How do you think it will affect intelligence sharing with our allies and our partners? Is this going to have a negative impact?
Hayden: Of course it’ll have a negative impact. It’s the third party rule. The word is now out that the president disregarded the third party rule and so you’re going to have a lot of countries hesitating to share information with us. Now can I measure that? No. Can we get over that over the long-term? Probably. But there’s a reason there’s a third party rule. And there are consequences when you decide to disregard it.
TCB: And what message is this sending to the Kremlin? When Russian President Vladimir Putin gets the report on Trump’s tweet, how do you think it would be perceived in Moscow?
Hayden: I think they’ll be high-fiving one another again for the success of their covert influence campaign from last summer, which is apparently continuing. What they have done is to create chaos inside the American political system with little cost to themselves.
TCB: You mentioned McMaster and Powell and how they were brought out by the White House last night. What does this mean for the credibility of the White House?
Hayden: I fear that when the president does these kinds of things, alright, or accuses his predecessor of wiretapping Trump Tower, or saying the South Koreans are going to have to pay for the missile system we imposed on them, a whole variety of things. You’ve got people around the president who somehow feel obliged to explain or cover for the president, and I fear that that circle going out from the person of the president himself is now sweeping in people like McMaster and Powell who should never be put into those roles. If you want the White House press office to do what it is they do to protect the president, that’s one thing. But it’s quite another thing to even mildly get the national security advisor team involved in that sort of thing.
