The White House denied that President Trump was briefed on the classified assessment, even though his staff has been discussing the matter since March.
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. assailed President Trump on Saturday for failing to punish Russia for offering bounties to the Taliban to kill American troops in Afghanistan, while the White House denied that Mr. Trump had been briefed on the months-old classified intelligence assessment about Russia’s activities.
Citing officials briefed on the matter, The New York Times reported on Friday that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly paid Taliban-linked militants to target coalition troops in Afghanistan, including Americans and that Mr. Trump had been briefed about it. The article also reported that the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, but no response had yet been authorized.
Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, portrayed that as shameful.
“Not only has he failed to sanction or impose any kind of consequences on Russia for this egregious violation of international law, Donald Trump has continued his embarrassing campaign of deference and debasing himself before Vladimir Putin,” Mr. Biden said in a virtual town hall event held by a voter group, Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote.
“His entire presidency has been a gift to Putin, but this is beyond the pale,” Mr. Biden added. “It’s a betrayal of the most sacred duty we bear as a nation, to protect and equip our troops when we send them into harm’s way.”
The officials briefed on the matter said the intelligence assessment was based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals. The officials said the assessment had been treated as a closely held secret but that the administration expanded briefings about it over the past week — including sharing information about it with the British government, whose forces are among those said to have been targeted.
But as criticism of the administration’s inaction swelled on Friday and Saturday, the White House claimed that Mr. Trump had never been told about the intelligence assessment.
“While the White House does not routinely comment on alleged intelligence or internal deliberations, the C. I. A. director, national security adviser and the chief of staff can all confirm that neither the president nor the vice president were briefed on the alleged Russian bounty intelligence,” the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, said in a statement Saturday afternoon, about 25 hours after the article was posted on The Times’s website.
But one American official had told The Times that the intelligence finding that the Russians had offered and paid bounties to Afghan militants and criminals had been briefed at the highest levels of the White House.
Another said it was included in the President’s Daily Brief, a written document which draws from spywork to make analytic predictions about longstanding adversaries, unfolding plots and emerging crises around the world.
