It's been less than a full day since reports of Donald Trump casually blabbing code-word level intelligence to visiting Russian dignitaries, but the first signs of damage are already becoming apparent. The intelligence he shared was apparently obtained from a source so secret that we haven't even told our allies about it; the effects of burning such a sensitive source are, obviously, that nations are going to have to step back and reevaluate whether they turn over such information at all.
A senior European intelligence official tells The Associated Press that his country might stop sharing information with the United States if it confirms President Donald Trump shared classified details with Russian officials.
The official said Tuesday that doing so “could be a risk for our sources.”
We don't know which nation shared their source's information with us, but Trump's spur-of-the-moment brag has alarmed even our closest allies.
[Burkhard Lischka], who sits on the German parliament’s intelligence oversight committee, noted that Trump has access to “exclusive and highly sensitive information including in the area of combating terrorism.”
The Social Democratic Party lawmaker said that if the U.S. president “passes this information to other governments at will, then Trump becomes a security risk for the entire western world.”
This is not a matter of mere pique, on the part of the nations cooperating with us; the damage that can be done by revealing key intelligence discoveries is, intelligence officials have been warning, far more severe than Trump's self-centered pouting acknowledges.
Simply revealing that we know it risks unmasking the information's source. Ex-Information Security Oversight Office head Bill Leonard, to Politico:
"It may not be readily apparent to people not familiar with intelligence. But the mere concept of the information may be revealing."
For example, "If someone revealed that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin had eggs and bacon for breakfast, that seems innocuous. How the heck do we know what he had for breakfast? It is potentially source revealing."
In short, revealing information that could only have come from a bare handful of sources paints a target on those sources. It may be enough to expose them; it may be enough to get them killed. That, and not the specific information itself, is reason for a top-level classification of the sort that Donald Trump so casually invalidated.
The specific source of the information he shared is likely, as of this morning, no longer an operative source. The nation that told us such sensitive information, only to be repaid in this fashion, will likely not share similar information in the future. And that likely means we're not going to get information about some newly planned terrorist attacks that we would otherwise have obtained; Trump's self-centered bluster has made America markedly less safe. He either does not understand that or does not care.