And you thought last week was nuts. The Washington Post reported on Monday afternoon that, in his highly publicized meeting with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, President Trump revealed “highly classified information” that the United States hadn’t even shared with its own allies:
The information Trump 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.
The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said that Trump’s decision to do so risks cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and National Security Agency.
“This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”
BuzzFeed, meanwhile, wrote that one national security official said “it’s far worse than what has already been reported.”
This is insane! It’s also totally in character. Call it the Trump paradox, where unbelievable things are also unsurprising. You would normally assume that a president who has dealt for months with accusations that he was too cozy (if not borderline treasonous) with Russian officials would be especially careful with Russian officials, so as not to send the wrong impression. And yet Trump was not only photographed laughing and smiling with two Russian officials, he gave them highly classified information for seemingly no national security reason at all. Instead, he seems to only have revealed classified information to Russian officials—which seems to have both jeopardized America’s relationship with key allies and human lives—because he is both dumb and easy to manipulate. And, once again, Trump’s proven that everything he and his allies said about Hillary Clinton during the campaign is true ten times over about him.
Donald Trump is Doctor Strangelove on cheap diet pills.