The White House Just Responded to a Report Claiming Trump Divulged Classified Info to the Russians

“The story that came out tonight, as reported, is false.”

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Early Monday evening, national security adviser H.R. McMaster dismissed an explosive Washington Post report alleging that President Donald Trump shared highly classified information with Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak at a White House meeting on May 10.

“I was in the room. It didn’t happen,” McMaster said.

“There’s nothing the president takes more seriously than the security of the American people,” he added. “The story that came out tonight as reported is false. The president and the foreign minister reviewed a range of common threats to our two countries, including threats to civil aviation. At no time were intelligence sources or methods discussed, and the president did not discuss any military operations that were not already publicly known.”

The general said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was also in the room, and that Tillerson confirms the incident unfolded the same way.

The Post story did not ever say that “intelligence sources or methods” were discussed, but that Trump revealed tightly held secret information that was provided by a US partner, and that the revelation would likely allow Russian intelligence agents to determine intelligence sources and methods independently.

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We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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