Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency in 2017.

I'm Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Editor of The Spectator. Today I'm joined again by Paul Wood of the BBC and we're going to be talking about Trump's intelligence

breach. So Paul, this is really part two, I suppose, in a way to last week's podcast with you,

where we spoke about Trump's shocking firing of the FBI director James Comey, because this week we learned that a day after of the firing,

Trump had this meeting with Sergei Lavrov and the Russian ambassador to Washington,

in which, according to the Washington Post, he sort of spilled the beans on some highly

classified information, and this is causing another storm in Washington that relates to Trump and Russia.

Can you explain for us a bit what's going on?

Well, according to the Post, and this is in some other media, clearly somebody in the White House is leaking.

Mr. Trump is part of a freewheeling discussion in order to impress his Russian guests,

gave details of a supposed plot by ISIS to carry out a terrorist attack.

Mr. Trump's story is that he was simply informing his Russian friends about the safety of airliners in general.

And he hasn't exactly admitted to this.

But if it's true, the damaging thing here is this is intelligence which came from a close ally.

And nobody said which ally.

And a lot of intelligence professionals will say this could well damage that relationship

and cut off the flow of information.

Nobody said which country is involved. I have a feeling it might be Turkey. And if it is Turkey,

Turkey would certainly not want that information shared with the Russians. This is all the more

piquant because President Erdogan of Turkey is shortly to make an official visit to Washington.

There are a lot of similarities with the Comey firing in that the White House immediately and

categorically denied that Mr Trump had done this in the same way that they categorically

...