Story highlights
The White House said The Washington Post report was false
"I think that the White House is playing word games," one of the reporters said on "OutFront"
A Washington Post correspondent stood by his story Monday evening as the White House tried to declare it “false.”
“I think that the White House is playing word games,” Greg Miller said on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront.”
The Washington Post story, authored by Miller and Greg Jaffe, cited current and former US officials and said President Donald Trump told Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak about highly classified intelligence the US had received from an ally.
Washington Post: Trump shared classified info to Russians
National security adviser H.R. McMaster, who also attended the meeting, said from the White House following the story’s publication that the story “as reported is false.”
“I was in the room,” McMaster said. “It didn’t happen.”
Miller said he thought the White House was trying “to blunt the impact” of the story.
“If this was all so above-board and not problematic in any way, why did the National Security Council coming out of this meeting feel it was necessary to contact the CIA director and the director of the National Security Agency to give them a heads’ up on what Trump had just told the Russians?” Miller said.
McMaster said that during the meeting, “at no time were any intelligence sources or methods discussed.”
The Washington Post story did not say specific sources or methods were discussed, but does cite officials who said Trump revealed the city within ISIS territory where the US ally had detected the threat Trump had discussed.
CNN had previously broken the story on the intelligence that Trump reportedly discussed – that ISIS had been devising ways to plant explosives in large electronic devices and defeat screening systems intended to keep them off aircraft.
At the time, CNN agreed to withhold key details, including the name of the city where the threat was detected, at the request of US government officials, who were concerned that if it was revealed, it could also reveal intelligence sources and methods.
One US official in the Post story said that from the information Trump gave in the Oval Office, Russia “could identify our sources or techniques.”
CNN’s Evan Perez contributed to this report.
