The president has wide-ranging legal authority to declassify secrets, and if he did so in a discreet conversation with Russian leaders, with top USA national security official present, there is no scandal there-and would not be, even if an ally didn't like what was said in the discussion.
Steve Hayes of The Weekly Standard said the White House has shifted its story on whether President Trump shared classified intelligence with Russian officials.
Congressional Republicans and Democrats expressed concern about the report.
Still, the White House has not expressly denied that classified information was disclosed in the Oval Office meeting between Trump and Russian diplomats last week.
The U.S. official said that Trump boasted about his access to classified intelligence in last week's meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak. The paper quoted one official as saying that Trump had "revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies".
The White House on Tuesday defended President Donald Trump's disclosure of classified information to senior Russian officials as "wholly appropriate", as officials tried to beat back criticism from fellow Republicans and concerns from global allies.
"I think it would be helpful if the president spent more time on things we're trying to accomplish and less time on other things", McConnell said in an interview with Bloomberg News.
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Ahok's political success was seen as a significant development in a city where anti-Chinese riots occurred in 1998. Prosecutors had called for a suspended one-year jail sentence for Purnama on charges of hate speech.
As Barton Gellman, a former Washington Post correspondent, pointed out, the fact that the newspaper was asked by government officials not to reveal details of the plot divulged by Trump strongly suggests that their report was accurate. The president and U.S. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster have not denied the specific claim that what the president shared was classified.
"I have been asking Director Comey & others, from the beginning of my administration, to find the LEAKERS in the intelligence community", he wrote.
One European nation allied with the USA told The Associated Press that the possibility that Trump might share sensitive information obtained by them without their permission could lead them to stop passing on news of threats obtained in the future.
McCain said she trusts McMaster and questioned whether it's appropriate for him to be in front of reporters "doing the Sean Spicer dance".
Rather than contest the accuracy of the report, Trump focused on the fact that, as president, he has the legal authority to declassify information and so cannot be prosecuted for sharing secrets with Russian Federation, as any other government official could be. Following a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trump said only that his meeting last week with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was "very, very successful". But presidential trips overseas can leave some problems behind and begin a reset even if relief is only temporary. His tweets came minutes after a spokeswoman for Russia's foreign ministry described the reports in a post on Facebook as "yet another fake".
A short time later, Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, also called on the White House to make a transcript available to the Congressional intelligence committees. According to the daily, the sensitive, classified information was given to the USA by one of its allies, which had not given it permission to share it with the Russians. Comey, who was leading a probe into possible collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian Federation, was sacked as Federal Bureau of Investigation director a day before last week's White House meeting.
Republicans from both swing and conservative districts called for more information from the White House. His criticism has been followed by a steady stream of leaks to the media that have been damaging to Trump and exposed an FBI investigation into his associates' possible ties to Russian Federation.
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