Trump Appears to Confirm He Spilled Highly Classified U.S. Secrets to Russia

Welcome to WHAT NOW, a morning round-up of the news/fresh horrors that await you today.

After the White House rolled out two of the country’s top foreign affairs officials Monday night to deny a Washington Post report that President Trump revealed highly classified information in a recent meeting with Russian officials, Trump, as he loves to do, undermined them completely in just a couple of tweets.

By Monday night, both Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster had issued stern rebukes of the Post’s reporting that Trump shared “code word” level intelligence on ISIS (which the U.S. apparently hadn’t even shared with its own allies) during a meeting with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador last week.

Almost exactly an hour before Trump appeared to confirm the story, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry also denied the president revealed classified information.

A spokesperson denied that Trump had confirmed the Post’s report.

Wanna feel old? Trump fired James Comey, his FBI director, a mere week ago today.

WHAT ELSE?

• Mexican journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas, who reported extensively on the devastation drug trafficking is causing in Mexico, was shot dead in Sinaloa on Monday. He’s the fifth journalist killed in Mexico this year.
• The Trump administration is expanding the “global gag rule” that will withhold nearly $9 billion in funding from health organizations around the world if they so much as discuss abortion or family planning. It’s a move that could disrupt the work of hundreds of AIDS and malaria treatment clinics in Africa and around the globe, which comes after Trump signed an executive order reinstating the gag order in January.
• American officials and private sector cybersecurity officials are ready to blame last week’s massive ransomware attack on North Korea.
• Hillary Clinton is back. I’m too tired to say anything else about that.

WHAT FRESH HELL?

There seems to be more than enough of that to go around today, so here’s a meme.