On the heels of Donald Trump blurting out top-level classified information obtained from Israel during his meeting with Russian diplomats, Team Trump has done it again. "Anonymous officials" who were given the suspected Manchester bomber's identity almost immediately leaked that information to the American press, and the British government is furious.
High-ranking British officials, including Home Secretary Amber Rudd, are speaking out against the US, after a number of confidential details in the ongoing investigation into Monday's Manchester attack appeared in American media before the British authorities confirmed them.
"The British police have been very clear that they want to control the flow of information to protect operational integrity, the element of surprise," Rudd said in an interview Wednesday with BBC's Radio 4. "So it is irritating if it gets released from other sources."
The reasons for not disclosing what investigators know in the hours after an attack are, obviously, so that any potential associates of the bomber aren't forewarned that police are already headed toward them. You know: basic security stuff.
Meanwhile, Israel has responded to Trump's (sigh) unbelievable stupidity with unspecified tweaks to how they'll be sharing information with the U.S. in the future.
Israeli defense chief Avigdor Liberman told Army Radio on Wednesday, “I can confirm that we did a spot repair and that there’s unprecedented intelligence cooperation with the United States." [...]
Liberman declined to say what changes had been made. "Not everything needs to be discussed in the media; some things need to be talked about in closed rooms," he said.
The "spot repair" to protocols may have been as simple as the direction to share nothing obtained from Israel with Donald Trump or his staff. It's not clear that anything less would be effective.