Donald Trump shared classified intelligence with Russian officials, putting Israeli assets at risk. Trump shared the location of two nuclear submarines with Rodrigo Duterte, putting US assets at risk. And now the Trump team has shared the name of the Manchester bomber along with other information, putting the investigation of the British terrorist attack at risk.
High-ranking British officials, including Home Secretary Amber Rudd, are speaking out against the US, after a number of confidential details in the ongoing investigation into Monday's Manchester attack appeared in American media before the British authorities confirmed them.
It’s all part of a pattern in which the Trump regime talks tough about leakers letting out the details of their own misdeeds, but dishes classified information like paparazzi. The result of the Trump regime’s loose lip is that the US is already getting cut out of further information coming from the Manchester investigation.
According to a report by the BBC, British police investigating the Manchester attack have now decided to withhold information from the United States in the wake of the leaks.
Supporters have been rushing to toss a “the president can declassify anything he wants, it’s no big deal” blanket over Trump’s information spills, but unlike the email messages that were treated as an outrage during the campaign, the look-what-we-know gleeful overshare of the Trump White House is endangering lives. Including American lives.
As Trump meets with UK Prime Minister Teresa May, he should expect a cool reception and a reminder that sharing official information like “locker-room talk” threatens the special relationship between British and American intelligence services.
British Prime Minister Theresa May has said she will insist that intelligence shared with the United States must remain secure when she meets with President Donald Trump.
In Brussels on Thursday for a NATO summit at which Trump will also be present, May said she would “make clear” to the U.S. president that leaking of sensitive information to the media must cease, the Press Association reported.
Trump has often gone on the attack against “leakers,” but that desire to turn off the tap has been uniformly related to people who spill information about his own misstatements, misdeeds, and deceptions. For example, in the case of Donald Trump giving over classified information sourced from a critical Israeli asset embedded with ISIS, Trump’s team absolutely waved off any idea that Trump might have made a mistake in giving up information to the Russians. Instead they turned all their ire toward the (apparently multiple sources) that revealed Trump’s leak to the media.
In Trump’s understanding, revealing classified information is not an issue. But revealing that Trump made a mistake is serious. So long as the regime practices this mendacious dichotomy, it both can’t be trusted with genuine intelligence and should expect everything it says to be readily shared with the press.
In the case of the Manchester information, it’s not clear where in the pipeline intelligence is spilling.
It is not known who has been leaking the information or where they work. But the steady stream of information appearing in U.S. press has persuaded Greater Manchester Police to take the extraordinary step of no longer sharing information on the investigation with the Americans, the BBC reported.
Normally, Britain and America sustain a two-way flow of information on terror investigations.
What does this mean if the information in the Manchester investigation leads to suspects who could be in the United States? How will this event affect the future flow of information between the UK and US? It’s already slowing the transfer of intelligence. It could get worse.
What happens now depends on whether the Trump regime can be made to recognize the difference between mistakenly sharing classified information in ways that are harmful, and sharing the information that someone made that mistake.