A White House television showed a news report on Monday about President Trump’s recent Oval Office meeting with Russian officials. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
In a pair of early-morning tweets, Mr. Trump did not dispute reports that he might have provided enough details to reveal the source of the information and the manner in which it had been collected. The information about the Islamic State plot came from a Middle Eastern ally and was considered so sensitive that American officials did not share it widely within their own government or among allies.
Mr. Trump spoke about highly classified intelligence in a White House meeting with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, last week, a current and a former American government official told The New York Times on Monday. The news was first reported by The Washington Post and, soon after, many organizations — including Buzzfeed, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times — quickly published their own accounts of the disclosure.
Mr. Trump’s tweets on Tuesday morning appeared to undercut the carefully worded statements made by his advisers on Monday night that attempted to dispute the original story without taking issue with specific facts in it. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson said in a statement that the president “did not discuss sources, methods or military operations” with the Russians. Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, likewise told reporters that Mr. Trump had not disclosed intelligence methods or sources.
But The Washington Post and the other news organizations did not report that he had done so. Instead, they focused on the breach of espionage etiquette, the possibility that American allies might be discouraged from sharing intelligence with the United States, and Mr. Trump’s tendency to go off-script, at times to the chagrin of his advisers.
Mr. McMaster told reporters on Monday that The Post’s account “as reported” was “false,” but in his tweets on Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump made no such assertion and instead sought to justify what he had done. This has become something of a pattern: On Thursday, Mr. Trump told NBC News that the F.B.I.’s investigation of his campaign’s ties to Russia had been a factor in his decision to fire the bureau’s director, James B. Comey. That undercut his vice president’s assertion that the two issues were unrelated.
In his Tuesday posts on Twitter, Mr. Trump tried to turn attention away from whether he had leaked information to finding those who had disclosed what he had done. “I have been asking Director Comey & others, from the beginning of my administration, to find the LEAKERS in the intelligence community,” he wrote.
The story touched off a flurry of condemnations from Democrats who recalled how Mr. Trump had called for Hillary Clinton to be imprisoned for mishandling classified information by using a private email server. Even a number of Republicans expressed varying levels of concern or alarm and called for an accounting of what had happened.
But others said they were willing to reserve judgment. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a former Army captain, said Tuesday morning that he was inclined to believe the White House version of events over the news media, which he said had no way of knowing the entire story. “They were not in the room,” he said in a radio broadcast.
“I expect the administration will brief the Congress more fully,” he added. “But I have much greater confidence in H. R. McMaster on the record, in front of cameras, than I do anonymous sources in the media.”
The episode fueled questions about Mr. Trump’s relationship with Moscow at the same time that the F.B.I. and congressional committees are investigating whether his associates cooperated with Russians in meddling in last year’s campaign. Mr. Trump has repeatedly dismissed such suspicions as false stories spread by Democrats to explain their election defeat. But his friendly approach toward President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in spite of Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine and other actions has stirred controversy.
Mr. Trump met with Mr. Lavrov and Mr. Kislyak in the Oval Office in response to a request by Mr. Putin and despite the fact that former President Barack Obama had refused to invite the Russian foreign minister into the White House since Russia annexed Crimea and stoked a military intervention in eastern Ukraine.
The Washington Post reported that Mr. Trump had described details of an Islamic State terrorist threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft.
Although Mr. Trump’s tweets on Tuesday did not mention laptops, he said he had shared “facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety” with Russian officials. He said he did so for “humanitarian reasons,” adding, “plus I want Russia to greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism.”
Last week, American officials said they might move to ban laptops from carry-on baggage on all flights from Europe to the United States — a change that would inconvenience many business travelers, who would be forced to check computers in their luggage.
The issue is scheduled to be the subject of a closed-door meeting on Wednesday afternoon in Brussels between Elaine C. Duke, the deputy secretary of Homeland Security, and Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European Union’s commissioner for migration, home affairs and citizenship.
Russia dismissed the reports on Tuesday. A spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry denied that Mr. Trump had given classified information to Russian officials, and she denigrated American news reports of the disclosure as “fake.”
“I just landed in Madrid,” the spokeswoman, Maria V. Zakharova, wrote on Facebook during a work trip to Spain. “I turned on the phone, and there were dozens of messages. ‘Maria Vladimirovna, is it true Trump revealed the most important secret?’ ”
Ms. Zakharova called the report “the latest fake,” and disparaged the newspapers that published it. “Guys, you are again reading American newspapers? You should not read them. They can be used in various ways, but there’s no need to read them — lately, this is not only harmful, but dangerous.”
She did not specify in what ways the newspapers should be used.
Ms. Zakharova said she had predicted last Thursday, the day after the meeting, that American news organizations would be preparing a “sensation” about the meeting. The news media’s plan included, she wrote, publishing secret photographs to “give this latest fake grounding and legitimacy.”
“This part of the information campaign we destroyed, having published photographs in accordance with all laws of professional ethics.”
She did not elaborate.
Both Russia and the United States are battling the Islamic State, but they are backing different sides in the Syrian civil war.
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