President Donald Trump meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, right, at the White House in Washington. Credit:AP "What the president discussed with the foreign minister was wholly appropriate to that conversation and is consistent with the routine sharing of information between the president and any leaders with which he's engaged," Mr McMaster said, referring to Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. Mr McMaster said the conversation with Mr Lavrov and Sergey I. Kislyak, Russian ambassador to the United States, in the Oval Office last week was consistent with "what the expectations are of our intelligence partners." In fact, Mr McMaster said, "The president wasn't even aware of where this information came from." The general's briefing came hours after Mr Trump went on Twitter to defend his actions. "As president, I wanted to share with Russia (at an openly scheduled W.H. meeting) which I have the absolute right to do, facts pertaining to terrorism and flight safety. Humanitarian reasons, plus I want Russia to greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism," he wrote, using an acronym for the Islamic State.

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster refuted the story again on Tuesday. Credit:AP The news was first reported by The Washington Post and, soon after, many organisations - including BuzzFeed, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times - quickly published their own accounts of the disclosure.

Mr Trump's Twitter posts on Tuesday morning appeared to undercut the carefully worded statements made by his advisers on Monday night to try to dispute the original news reports without taking issue with specific facts in them. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in a statement that the president "did not discuss sources, methods or military operations" with the Russians. Mr McMaster, likewise told reporters that Mr Trump had not disclosed intelligence methods or sources. But The Post and the other news organisations did not report that he had done so. Instead, they focused on the breach of espionage etiquette, and on the possibility that US allies might be discouraged from sharing intelligence with the United States. They also noted Mr Trump's tendency to go off-script, at times to the chagrin of his advisers. Mr McMaster told reporters on Monday that The Post's account "as reported" was "false," but in his Twitter posts on Tuesday morning, Mr Trump made no such assertion and instead sought to justify what he had done. In his briefing several hours later, Mr McMaster suggested that there was no distinction. "I stand by my statement I made yesterday," he said. "What I'm saying is the premise of that article is false." This has become something of a pattern: On Thursday, Mr Trump told NBC News that the FBI's investigation of his campaign's ties to Russia had been a factor in his decision to fire the bureau's director, James Comey, and that the decision was not related to a recommendation from the deputy attorney general. Those comments undercut the accounts provided by his vice president and other advisers. In his Tuesday posts on Twitter, Mr Trump tried to turn attention away from whether he had leaked information to finding those who had disclosed what he had done. "I have been asking Director Comey & others, from the beginning of my administration, to find the LEAKERS in the intelligence community," he wrote.

Administration officials were blindsided by the president's messages early on Tuesday and scrambled to reconcile the gap between them and Mr McMaster's comments. Mr Trump's aides realised that not having Mr McMaster answer questions Monday night was going to prolong the story into a new day. But they believed they had been hamstrung by administration lawyers about exactly what could be said. The story touched off a flurry of condemnations from Democrats who recalled how Mr Trump had called for Hillary Clinton to be imprisoned for mishandling classified information by using a private email server. Even a number of Republicans expressed varying levels of concern and called for an accounting of what had happened. "I think a line was crossed and we need to know now, in Congress, just exactly what was told and what does this mean for the future of information sharing with allies and for the troops who are serving abroad," Representative Eric Swalwell of California, a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on Morning Joe on MSNBC. Republican Senator Ben Sasse said on the same show that Mr McMaster's statement was not actually a denial. "When I look at McMaster's quote, it's a pretty technical quote," Mr Sasse said. "I think it's actually something quite different from a full rebuttal of the story." But other Republicans said they were willing to reserve judgment. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Tuesday morning that he was inclined to believe the White House version of events over the news media, which he said had no way of knowing the entire story. "They were not in the room," he said in an interview on Hugh Hewitt's radio show.

"I suspect the administration will brief the Congress more fully on exactly what transpired," Mr Cotton said. "But I have much greater confidence in the word of H.R. McMaster on the record, in front of cameras, than I do anonymous sources in the media." Still, there was evident fatigue among Republicans with the latest episode. Loading "I think we could do with a little less drama from the White House on a lot of things so that we can focus on our agenda," Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader, said on Bloomberg Television. The New York Times