y Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador

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 Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.

The information the president 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.

.. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

 .. describing details of an Islamic State terrorist threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.
.. officials expressed concern about Trump’s handling of sensitive information as well as his grasp of the potential consequences.
.. “Trump seems to be very reckless and doesn’t grasp the gravity of the things he’s dealing with, especially when it comes to intelligence and national security.
.. Trump seemed to be boasting about his inside knowledge of the looming threat. “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day,”
.. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.
.. Moscow would be keenly interested in identifying that source and perhaps disrupting it.
.. But the two nations have competing agendas in Syria, where Moscow has deployed military assets and personnel to support President Bashar al-Assad.
.. given the clues Trump provided, “I don’t think that it would be that hard [for Russian spy services] to figure this out.”
.. At a more fundamental level, the information wasn’t the United States’ to provide to others.
.. Senior White House officials appeared to recognize quickly that Trump had overstepped and moved to contain the potential fallout.
.. the National Security Council continues to prepare multi-page briefings for Trump to guide him through conversations with foreign leaders, but that he has insisted that the guidance be distilled to a single page of bullet points — and often ignores those.

The Pentagon Papers: Secrets, lies and leaks

In this episode of Reveal, we’re using the full hour to take a deep look at the leaking and publication of the Pentagon Papers. At the center of the episode are two guys who have a knack for being in the room when history gets made: Robert J. Rosenthal and Daniel Ellsberg.

.. When Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, he was turning his back on a long career close to power, immersed in government secrets. His early career as a nuclear war strategist made him fear that a small conflict could erupt into a nuclear holocaust.

Mike Flynn’s Pakistan Problem

The incoming national security advisor allegedly shared classified intel with Pakistan’s notoriously compromised security services. What does that mean for Trump’s “AfPak” policy?

..  Former U.S. officials said that Flynn had disclosed sensitive information to Pakistan in late 2009 or early 2010 about secret U.S. intelligence capabilities being used to monitor the Haqqani network, an insurgent group accused of repeated attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan.”

This allegation, if true, is far more concerning than the more recent one, given the links known to exist between the Haqqani network and Pakistani intelligence. In 2011, Mike Mullin, then the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the Haqqani network as a “veritable arm” of Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s main intelligence agency.

.. Furthermore, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, if confirmed as secretary of state, is likely to take a strong interest in the energy-focused connectivity projects proliferating across the region — from the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor to the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline. This isn’t just because of his energy background, but also because the envisioned outcomes of these projects — more energy security, better infrastructure and regional integration, increased employment, and above all, greater stability — align with Washington’s strategic interests in the region.

.. Trump, a bottom-line guy, should be advised that his administration’s policy challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan boil down to two critical questions:

  1. How to promote stability, the chief U.S. interest in the region, with a lighter footprint?
  2. And how much diplomatic, security, and financial capital to expend in pursuit of stability that’s long been elusive, despite ample U.S. largesse?