Afghanistan plans

Pelosi aide accuses Trump team of security threat by leaking new Afghanistan plans

By HEATHER CAYGLE

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has officially postponed her trip to Afghanistan, with her staff saying that President Donald Trump’s decision to make public the details of her travel made it too dangerous for her and other lawmakers to follow through.

Pelosi’s spokesman made the announcement Friday morning, accusing the administration of taking the extraordinary step of leaking Pelosi’s plans to fly commercially to Afghanistan after Trump made a very public show of grounding the military aircraft that was originally set aside for the trip.

“This morning, we learned that the Administration had leaked the commercial travel plans as well,” Pelosi’s spokesman, Drew Hammill, said in a statement Friday morning.

“In light of the grave threats caused by the President’s action, the delegation has decided to postpone the trip so as not to further endanger our troops and security personnel, or the other travelers on the flights.”

It would have been extraordinarily rare for the speaker – who is second in line to the presidency – to fly commercial overseas on an official congressional trip, particularly to a war zone. But Hammill said she and other senior lawmakers in the delegation were initially going to move forward with the trip until details of their revised plans were also made public.

“In the middle of the night, the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service provided an updated threat assessment detailing that the President announcing this sensitive travel had significantly increased the danger to the delegation and to the troops, security, and other officials supporting the trip," Hammill said.

The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.

The announcement from Pelosi’s office on Friday is just the latest volley in a war that has broken out between the speaker and Trump in the shadow of the ongoing government shutdown, now in its 28th day.

Pelosi kicked the tit-for-tat up a notch on Wednesday by sending a surprise letter to Trump suggesting he postpone his State of the Union address until the government is reopened. Trump fired back on Thursday, canceling Pelosi’s trip on a military flight overseas just an hour before she and other lawmakers were scheduled to depart Washington.

In the letter, which the White House blasted out to reporters before the speaker’s office was even aware of the cancellation, Trump said if Pelosi decided to fly commercially “that would certainly be your prerogative.” But allies of the speaker quickly criticized the letter, saying Trump had taken it too far by revealing sensitive travel details that could have put Pelosi and other lawmakers in harm's way.

“The president’s decision to disclose a trip that the speaker was making to a war zone was completely and utterly irresponsible in every way,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told a gaggle of reporters outside of Pelosi’s office on Thursday. Schiff was supposed to join Pelosi for the trip overseas.

The sparring match between the president and the top Democrat in Washington has left others on Capitol Hill discouraged and shaking their heads as the shutdown drags on with no end in sight.

Congress is out until Tuesday and there are currently no meetings scheduled between top leaders to try and broker a compromise to end what has become the longest shutdown in history.