Bladewire

White House calls Russian denials on Syrian gas attack a 'coverup'

The White House on Tuesday accused Russia of a "coverup" of Syria's chemical attack on its own citizens, but stopped short of saying that the Kremlin knew in advance of last Tuesday's poison-gas attack that killed dozens of Syrian villagers.

Russia has consistently denied that the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad dropped a bomb containing sarin, a banned nerve agent. President Trump responded on Thursday by approving a missile strike on a Syrian air base used to launch the chemical attack.

A declassified intelligence assessment released by the White House asserts that Syria and Russia "have sought to confuse the world community about who is responsible for using chemical weapons against the Syrian people in this and earlier attacks."

"The coverup is the disinformation," said a White House official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the report. "The Russian narrative is false."

Russian military advisors were at the Shayrat air base when a Syrian warplane carrying the chemical weapon took off early on April 4, the White House official said, raising questions about whether the Russians knew in advance about the attack.

U.S. intelligence officials do not agree on whether the Kremlin knew about the gas attack beforehand, the official said.

"There is not a consensus on our side" about Russian foreknowledge, according to the official.

But the presence of Russian personnel at Shayrat prompted U.S. intelligence analysts to consider the possibility that Moscow may have known about hidden stores of the nerve agent sarin and knew that the toxic substance was being prepared for use in an attack.

Russia's repeated denials that Syrian forces launched the attack have driven a deeper wedge between the Trump administration and Russian officials as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is visiting Moscow for his first official visit.

That trip that was initially billed as following through on Trump's longstanding campaign promise to try to build a bridge between Washington and Moscow after years of chilly relations.

On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters in Moscow that accusations leveled against Syria's government were a "provocation" and that the gas attack should be investigated by the United Nations.

The White House wants Russia, Syria's main patron, to "stop the disinformation campaign" and work to prevent Syrian forces from launching additional chemical attacks, a second White House official said, adding that the Kremlin has launched "a very clear campaign to obscure the nature of the attacks."

Fighters of Islamic State and other terrorist or rebel groups in Syria do not possess sarin, U.S. intelligence officials have asserted.

U.S intelligence officials have assessed that opposition forces were close to taking a strategic airfield near the west-central Syrian city of Hama and had come within striking range of neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city, gains that could have been a factor in the Syrian decision to launch the gas attack on Khan Sheikhoun, 22 miles to the north.

"There was a calculus that the regime and perhaps their Russian advisors" made when using chemical weapons, a White House official said, noting that Assad's forces were "spread quite thin."

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