Trump Retweets Fox News Report Citing Anonymous Intel Sources

President Donald Trump stands during an event to announce a Merck, Pfizer, and Corning joint partnership to make glass containers for medication, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Thursday, July 20, 2017, in ... President Donald Trump stands during an event to announce a Merck, Pfizer, and Corning joint partnership to make glass containers for medication, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Thursday, July 20, 2017, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) MORE LESS
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President Donald Trump, who constantly rants about “leakers” and warns his Twitter followers to be wary of anonymous sources, on Tuesday morning retweeted a Fox News report that cited anonymous intelligence community officials.

The report promoted by the “Fox and Friends” Twitter account cited unnamed U.S. officials with knowledge of intelligence in North Korea who said that spy agencies detected North Korea loading missiles onto a patrol boat.

It also appears that the report contained classified information. During an interview Tuesday morning on “Fox and Friends,” the hosts asked UN Ambassador Nikki Haley about the report. She would not discuss the report and indicated that it contained classified information.

“I can’t talk about anything that’s classified. And if that’s in the newspaper, that’s a shame,” Haley said.

After retweeting the report, Trump published his own tweet about addressing North Korea’s potential nuclear capabilities.

This post has been updated.

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Notable Replies

  1. So surely this will drive the final stake through anybody’s beliefs that Kelly has any control at all over Trump’s twitter use?

  2. “Tough and decisive” means you’d actually have to gather actual experts together and actually listen to them and then formulate an actual plan and lobby other world leaders to get consensus.

    Or you could just continue to tweet shit.

  3. A great business idea:

    A line of party goods tailored to celebrate the day Donald Trump drops dead. I know I’ll be having a few people over to mark the event.

  4. What in the world is the president doing tweeting intelligence info on Korea?

    We are indeed in deep trouble when two narcissistic leaders try to outdo each other in their bulling activities.

  5. Malcom Nance’s take on this was that loading missiles onto one boat is pretty routine stuff. If they were reloading missiles onto LOTS of patrol boats, that’s a much more worrisome sign of war preperation.

    But here is (one) of the problems with this story. Fox runs reports like this, precisely to instill fear in its viewers. Trump could easily get much more insightful and pertinent information on the issue from the intelligence community, but instead…he is going to Fox so he can have his own fears stoke a bit higher.

    This is how wars start.

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