The Washington Post reports:

President Trump told two senior Russian officials in a 2017 Oval Office meeting that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because the United States did the same in other countries, an assertion that prompted alarmed White House officials to limit access to the remarks to an unusually small number of people, according to three former officials with knowledge of the matter.

The comments, which have not been previously reported, were part of a now-infamous meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, in which Trump revealed highly classified information that exposed a source of intelligence on the Islamic State. He also said during the meeting that firing FBI Director James B. Comey the previous day had relieved “great pressure” on him.

A memorandum summarizing the meeting was limited to a few officials with the highest security clearances in an attempt to keep the president’s comments from being disclosed publicly, according to the former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. [Continue reading…]

Benjamin Wittes writes:

Shortly after the [above] story broke, I received a message from a person directly involved with the FBI’s decision to open a counterintelligence and obstruction investigation of President Trump in the immediate aftermath of the firing of FBI Director James Comey. To say this person, who had clearly learned about the matter for the first time from the Post, was angered by the story would be to understate the matter.

The message read in relevant part: “None of us had any idea. Multiple people had opportunity and patriotic reason to tell us. Instead, silence.”

It is a big deal that the FBI did not know when it opened its investigation that the president—in addition to boasting about relieving pressure on himself by firing Comey—had specifically disclaimed concern over Russian electoral interference to senior Russian officials.

The public already knew that the FBI was concerned about the national security implications of Comey’s dismissal when it opened its investigation in the chaotic days after the firing. We’ve known this since January 2019, when the New York Times reported that the bureau had opened both a counterintelligence and an obstruction probe of the president’s conduct. Central to the Times story were transcripts of former FBI General Counsel James Baker’s closed testimony before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees, which have now been publicly released. As Baker put it in that interview, “[N]ot only would it be an issue about obstructing an investigation, but the obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that … would be the threat to the national security.”

In other words, the bureau was concerned, as the Times put it, about “whether [Trump] had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.” The bureau’s “counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.” [Continue reading…]