With the White House looking like Grand Scandal Station — from Donald Trump’s intelligence sharing with Russian leaders to former FBI director James Comey’s claims that the president asked him to back off on the probe into former national security adviser Michael Flynn — we sat down with OZY senior columnist John McLaughlin to discuss the latest twists and turns.
DID TRUMP DO ANYTHING ILLEGAL IN SHARING CLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE WITH RUSSIAN LEADERS?
John McLaughlin: I’m not a lawyer, but my sense is that the president does have the authority to share and declassify whatever he wishes to declassify. The broader issue is the manner in which this information was apparently shared. In my former job, I was sometimes authorized to share information with the Russians. But before doing that, every word of it was scrubbed by intelligence agencies, carefully coordinated and narrowly defined. It was never done extemporaneously.
COULD ANY OPERATIVES’ LIVES BE AT RISK? COULD IT COMPROMISE OPERATIONS?
McLaughlin: What’s noteworthy is that Tom Bossert, the White House official in charge of counterterrorism, apparently called at least two of the intelligence agencies to alert them to the fact that certain things had been mentioned to the Russians. That tells me that something was said that was more sensitive than Bossert cared for, and that he felt he had to alert people. But we can’t definitively say people’s lives are at risk. We can probably say that whatever evidence was collected by whatever means may now be something the Russians can figure out. And that is not good, given that we have sharply different goals in Syria and that, given their close alliance with Syria and Iran, whatever they learned, in all likelihood, would be shared with those two countries.
THERE’S BEEN SPECULATION THAT THE COMPROMISED ALLY MAY BE ISRAEL. PLEASE PAINT A PICTURE OF THE FALLOUT FOR THE U.S. AND THE WRONGED COUNTRY IF WE STOP SHARING INTEL WITH THEM AS A RESULT.
McLaughlin: I don’t think the countries will stop sharing intel. But they’ll share it more carefully and with a great deal of concern and conceivably hold back some things. The relationship we have with the Israelis and the four commonwealth countries are among the most intimate in the world. They give us a lot, and we give them a lot, particularly on the Middle East. The information we get from partners in that part of the world is particularly valuable because they have access to the culture, to the “street” and the politics of those societies at a deeper, more granular level. So it’s not something you ever want to lose.
