Defense Minister: Israel Changing Intel-Sharing With U.S. After Trump Leak
Image by getty images
By Aiden Pink May 24, 2017
Israel altered how it shares intelligence with the United States after President Trump shared highly-classified Israeli information to Russia officials, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman revealed Wednesday.
“I can confirm that we did a spot repair and that there’s unprecedented intelligence cooperation with the United States,” Liberman said in an interview with Army Radio.
Liberman went on to say that he would not go into details about the nature of the information that Trump shared.
“We looked into it and cleared the air on the entire issue, and there is no need to continue to focus on it,” he said, adding that “what we had to clarify with our friends in the United States, we did. We did our checks.”
Israeli officials were reportedly “furious” that Trump gave the information, which concerned an ISIS terror plot, to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak during a White House meeting earlier this month.
Trump apparently tried to defend himself during a joint appearance in Jerusalem on Tuesday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, telling reporters that he “never mentioned the word or the name Israel” during the Russia meeting.
“Intelligence cooperation is terrific, never been better,” Netanyahu added.
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
