Defense Minister: Israel Changing Intel-Sharing With U.S. After Trump Leak
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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 pink@forward.com or on Twitter, @aidenpink.
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