Donald Trump's 2017 Oval Office meeting with top Russian officials Sergey Lavrov and Sergey Kislyak is looking very different today

L-R: Lavrov, Trump, Kislyak in Oval Office. Source: Tass

It happened on May 10, 2017, three months after Trump took office. It was shocking at the time that U.S. reporters were banned from the meeting, but Russian Tass reporters and photographers were allowed into the Oval Office. It was equally shocking to learn several days after Trump’s private conflab with the Russian Foreign Minister and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. that he had “shared secrets about Israel” with the two Russian officials.

The Washington Post at the time reported that Israel had not given permission for the secrets between the U.S. and Israel to be shared with anyone, much less the Russian foreign minister and ambassador. “This is code-word information,” a U.S. intelligence official told the Post, referring to one of the highest classification levels for secrets used by U.S. intelligence agencies and the Pentagon. The source told the Post that Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”

We know much more today than we did in May of 2017 about Trump’s loose handling of national security secrets. But even in 2017, we knew that Russia had plans to seize Ukrainian territory, because Russian soldiers wearing uniforms with no insignia had occupied parts of eastern Ukraine and Russia had seized the entirety of Crimea and declared it part of Russia in 2014. A Russian Buk missile had been used to shoot down Malaysian Air Flight 17 over Ukraine, killing 283 passengers and 15 crew members. We knew that Russian President Vladimir Putin was no friend of Israel’s and indeed no friend of Jewish citizens of his own country. Here is a July 2015 headline from Radio Free Europe: “Jews Are Fleeing Russia Because of Putin.” The story tells of 4,685 Jewish Russian citizens emigrating to Israel in 2014 alone. “Spooked by Russia's actions in Ukraine and by the increasingly stringent punishments for anyone deemed critical of the Kremlin, Russians of Jewish descent have been fleeing in droves over the past 18 months,” Radio Free Europe reported.

So, with that background, with the plight of Jews in Russia well known to the State Department — some of the Russian Jews were relocating to the U.S. — what was Donald Trump doing in a private meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister and ambassador telling them secrets about Israel that were so classified that they were marked in code, not in English? The next year, Trump met privately with Putin in Helsinki at a summit. There was no U.S. translator or note-taker present at the meeting. Afterwards, Trump told the media that he trusted Putin over his own intelligence agencies. We have no idea how many times the two men may have talked on the phone. As it became known after Jan. 6, Trump had a habit of ordering that the fact that me made certain phone calls not be registered by the White House switchboard.

Even with Trump’s indictment on espionage charges for his mishandling of top-secret documents at his home, Mar a Lago, we have no way of knowing what other secrets Trump may have shared with Russian officials during his four years in office and afterwards in retirement, given the number of national security documents he took with him when he left office.

Trump was a threat to our national security when he served as president, and it must be considered that with his open hostility to NATO and his blackmailing of Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, he was a threat to the security of other nations as well, among them Ukraine and Israel.