The White House is planning on getting less transparent under Donald Trump’s watch.
The Trump administration is planning to limit the amount of classified information it shares with Congress, four sources told Axios Wednesday. That will involve posting less on CAPNET, a system used to share information between the White House and Congress, as part of a “war on leakers,” one senior White House official told the publication.
The decision follows an intelligence leak Tuesday that revealed the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was less successful than the president had advertised.
The attack, conducted Saturday without the express approval of Congress, damaged facilities in Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan. A battle damage assessment by the Pentagon’s intelligence arm determined that the missile barrage only set Iran’s nuclear program back by a few months, rather than the “years” that Trump had advertised, CNN reported. The report was put on CAPNET late Monday, and by Tuesday afternoon, several outlets had already written about the back-channel evaluation.
“Go figure: Almost as soon as we put the information on CAPNET, it leaks,” an administration source told Axios. “There’s no reason to do this again.”
The White House immediately rejected the report Tuesday, rebuffing the whistleblower as a “low-level loser,” though it still acknowledged that the report had been classified as “top secret.” On Wednesday, the administration had apparently thrown the U.S. intelligence out the window altogether, siding instead with a narrative pushed by the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission that the attacks had “rendered the enrichment facility inoperable.”
“The FBI is investigating the leak,” one source told Axios. “The intelligence community is figuring out how to tighten up their processes so we don’t have ‘Deep State’ actors leaking parts of intel analysis that have ‘low confidence’ to the media.”
But the decision isn’t likely to sit well with public representatives, who were already frustrated and upset by the president’s decision to keep them in the dark ahead of conducting airstrikes on Iran: Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez traded barbs with Trump after she wrote online that the unauthorized attack is grounds for impeachment, while Republican Representative Thomas Massie argued that war with Iran was not constitutional, chastising House Republican leadership for failing to call lawmakers back to Congress at such a critical time.
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