H. R. McMaster and Appropriate Presidential Behavior

“Wholly appropriate” was a phrase that H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser, used more than half a dozen times in a press briefing on Tuesday morning, in describing what President Donald Trump revealed to Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in an Oval Office meeting last week. The Washington Post, followed by other media organizations, had described the conversation in a way that was wholly dismaying. The various accounts had Trump boasting about his intelligence (perhaps in both senses of the word) and showing off the most sensitive information in the same way that he showed reporters who visited his Trump Tower office the framed magazine covers on his wall, each one bearing a picture of Trump. Worse, the Post reported that the intelligence Trump bragged about came from a Middle Eastern ally that had not given permission to share it, and that might not want the Russians, in particular, to know the sources and methods by which it had learned that information—information which, according to press reports, Trump may have put at risk. (According to further press reports, the ally in question is Israel, raising the possibility that what Trump did was roughly the fun-house-mirror image of what Jonathan Pollard was convicted of doing.) One of the Post’s sources, a former official, called it “all kind of shocking.” Not even Republicans seemed to know what to do with the story when it broke on Monday; many of them, like Senator Bob Corker, repeated worried comments about the need for order in the White House. Others muttered about national security—like Paul Ryan, who sent out a spokesman to say that “protecting our nation’s secrets is paramount,” and then went into hiding.

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Presidential Nondisclosure Agreement