President Trump said Tuesday that “illegal leaks coming out of Washington” are the “real story” in the wake of the resignation of his national security adviser.
“The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington?” the president wrote on Twitter.
“Will these leaks be happening as I deal on N. Korea etc.?”
Mike Flynn stepped down as national security adviser after acknowledging he misled the White House over his talks with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak about US sanctions against Moscow.
His departure came after reports revealed that then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates had warned the White House that Flynn had provided false information about his contacts with Kislyak, which could make Flynn vulnerable to blackmail.
Trump had earlier called for a probe of leaks in the West Wing after details of phone conversations he had with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto were made public.
“The president takes these leaks very seriously,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer told Fox News last week.
But the constant drip, drip, drip of sensitive and confidential information from the White House has some Republican leaders worried.
“I am going to be asking the FBI to do an assessment of this to tell us what’s going on here because we cannot continue to have these leaks as a government,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) told Fox News late Monday night.
Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said information leaking about Flynn’s phone calls to the Russian ambassador are especially troublesome.
“If, in fact, the press reports are right, someone made the decision to deliberately listen to General Flynn’s phone calls and that is, I think, unprecedented, unwarranted and flat-out wrong,” he said.
Trump’s own very public response to North Korea launching a missile over the weekend also raised some eyebrows.
Trump and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe openly discussed how they should respond to the missile launch while dining at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort on Saturday night.
Facebook posts from several people who were dining in the public room at the time showed the two leaders poring over documents as aides held up their mobile phones to shed light on the table.
“HOLY MOLY!!!” wrote club member Richard DeAgazio on Facebook. “Wow … the center of the action!!!”
White House spokesman Sean Spicer downplayed the possibility that any sensitive information became public, saying Trump and Abe were only “reviewing the logistics for the press conference.”
But Democrats saw the episode differently.
“There’s no excuse for letting an international crisis play out in front of a bunch of country club members like dinner theater,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said on Twitter.
It wasn’t the only embarrassing social media revelation from Trump’s weekend with Abe at Mar-a-Lago.
A visitor posted a photo on Facebook showing the person who carries the briefcase with the nuclear codes at Trump’s winter White House.
“This is Rick…He carries the ‘football’ The nuclear football (also known as the atomic football, the President’s emergency satchel, the Presidential Emergency Satchel, the button, the black box, or just the football) is a briefcase, the contents of which are to be used by the President of the United States to authorize a nuclear attack while away from fixed command centers, such as the White House Situation Room,” the caption on Facebook read.
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