State officials were reportedly surprised by a White House statement attributed to Tillerson Monday.
The State Department was caught unaware by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson defending President Trump’s handling of highly classified information, according to a new report.
State Department officials were in the dark about a White House statement attributed to Tillerson and released Monday night, CNN said .
CNN said State released the same statement more than 20 minutes after Tillerson’s remarks were distributed by the White House.
Tillerson pushed back in that statement against a Washington Post report about Trump disclosing classified information in a recent meeting with top Russian officials.
One official said the sequence of events left State “scrambling” to ascertain which nations were impacted by the incident.
“During that exchange the nature of specific threats were discussed, but they did not discuss sources, methods, or military operations” he said in a statement.
The Post on Monday reported that Trump revealed highly classified intelligence information while meeting Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak last week.
Current and former U. S. officials told the Post that Trump relayed information from a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Trump’s “code-word information” disclosure risks damaging the relationship with the intelligence source, which has access to ISIS inner workings.
“ [Trump] revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies, ” a U. S. official with knowledge of the meeting said.
U. S. reporters were not permitted to cover last week’s meeting, where Trump allegedly described details about an ISIS threat using laptop computers on planes.
