Someone I know on Facebook, who is always posting “the REAL facts”, posted the following:
I think this is BS (he could have alerted them without, you know, giving them classified info) but I suspect you guys can supply an argument that is stronger than I could. And this deserves it.
Why does Trump care about saving only Russian lives? Shouldn’t he have shared this information with the entire world?
He didn’t make a decision to declassify carefully selected information so the Russians could fight terrorism.
He wanted to boast about how much America knows because he’s an emotional child, so he shared enough information that would allow Russia to identify the source, putting at jeopardy not just the source but also other countries’ willingness to share intel with us.
How do we know? Read the actual reporting. It is completely inconsistent with the idea that Trump did this deliberately and strategically. It was unplanned, haphazard, with press in the room (!), and they immediately went into damage control mode when it happened.
The story thats coming from intelligence community sources is that Trump revealed information that narrows the source of the intelligence (the city in Syria where it came from) which was provided by an ally under an intelligence sharing arrangement. As part of that intelligence sharing arrangement the receiver promises to not divulge the intelligence to a third party.
So even if Trump’s intentions were humanitarian (which I don’t believe for a second) it has been done in an incompetent way that damages the US credibility. Other allies will now be far less likely to share sensitive confidential information with the US.
In short no, the FB post is Russian propaganda.
Fact is the ‘needed’ part of that information was already in the news and available (that ISIS had plans to make laptop bombs, etc) - so there was nothing ‘new’ to share here.
Therefore the Russian’s already had the information they needed to work with this specific threat.
ANything that got shared that may lead to the exposure of the sources of that infromation, along with other sensitive details - is the problem here.
Trump revealed information gathered by an ally without that ally’s permission. While Trump is legally allowed to divulge this information it is a serious breach of the norms of countries sharing secret intelligence with each other.
This may allow the bad guys to figure out the source of the info and kill them.
It will also almost certainly mean our allies will be less likely to share critical intelligence with us.
So, even if the person you quoted is right and this will prevent a particular attack we are less likely to have information shared with us about future schemes to attack us.
Overall, Trump just put the US in greater danger than it was before he spoke to the Russians not to mention needlessly pissing off an ally.