More on Trump's breach of intelligence.

This is a supplement to the post from last night at 8:34 on the breaking news that President Trump last Tuesday, in meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister and the Russian Ambassador, casually revealed some "code-level" intelligence to the Russians.

This is of major concern because it may be possible for them to reverse-engineer the information and figure out the source of our intelligence partner who supplied the information.

As usual, Rachel Maddow had quickly assembled several experts in various capacities to help us understand the details.   "Code-level" intelligence is an extremely high level of sensitivity, above "top secret."   It means that not just anyone with top secret clearance can have access;   one has to have access to a special code that limits access even within our own government.  It would likely not be shared with our allies, much less adversaries.

According to Reuters, the Washington Post article "states clearly only that Trump discussed an Islamic State plot and the city where the plot was detected by an intelligence-gathering partner.  Officials worried that this information could lead to the discovery of the methods and sources involved.

That is what Trump so casually and blithely tossed off to impress his Russian guests -- but which they can take home with them and figure out the source.   As was pointed out, some of our interests in Syria overlap with Russian interests;  but some do not, where Russia is allied with Assad.  So this could be damaging to our source and location -- and it will give great pause to all the hundreds of other intelligence-sharing partners we have around the world that we depend on to help us avert threats and achieve objectives.  Lives depend on keeping these sources safe;  and we promise them that we will not share it.    Trump refuses to pay attention to his briefings -- or he would know this.

Rachel summed it all up in words very close to these, which I tried to take down verbatim:

"This is the first presidency in which the president is under counterterrorism investigation while being president;  who then fired the FBI Director investigating him;   and the day after that he hosted Russian officials in the Oval Office and gave them incredibly sensitive and damaging intelligence information that they were not entitled to have;   and he hosted them in the Oval Office at the personal request of Vladimir Putin, which he says he didn't feel he could say no to."

Think about that for a while.

Ralph