Trump Ran His Own Leak Check On Intel Briefers (VIDEO)

President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York, Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2017, in New York. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
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Donald Trump revealed during a Wednesday press conference that he had kept details of his meeting with U.S. intelligence officials from his own staff in order to figure out who ended up leaking details of that meeting to the press.

“I have many meetings with intelligence, and every time I meet, people are reading about it. Somebody’s leaking it out,” he told reporters. “So then I said maybe it’s my office. Maybe my office, because I have a lot of great people, maybe it’s them.”

Trump said he kept the content of the meeting secret so that he could determine if anyone on his staff was responsible for any leaks that may have emerged afterward.

“And what I did is I said I won’t tell anybody,” he said. “I’m going to have a meeting and I won’t tell anybody about my meeting with intelligence, and what happened is I had my meeting, nobody knew. Not even Rhona, my executive assistant for years! She didn’t know. I didn’t tell her.”

“Nobody knew. The meeting was had, the meeting was over, they left, and immediately the word got out that I had a meeting,” he continued. “So I don’t want that. I don’t want that. It’s very unfair to the country. It’s very unfair to our country what’s happened.”

In that response, the President-elect did not go as far as saying that the intelligence community was responsible for leaks about last week’s briefing.

Watch Trump’s answer below, via MSNBC:

This post has been updated.

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