The unusually secretive way the president has handled these meetings has left his own administration guessing what happened and piqued the interest of investigators.
Trump “Individual-1″ #TRE45ON 🇷🇺
“If you add up all these pieces, it’s a very damning picture at a minimum of how to handle national security,”, Andrew S. Weiss
“If any president would have wanted witnesses and protection, it ought to have been Donald Trump,” said Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and adviser to four presidents, most recently as President George W. Bush’s State Department policy planning director. “And yet he chose not to, and that adds fuel to the fire that something here is not right.”
“All five of the presidents whom I worked for, Republicans and Democrats, wanted a word-for-word set of notes, if only to protect the integrity of the American side of the conversation against later manipulation by the Soviets or the Russians,” said Victoria J. Nuland, a career diplomat who worked for Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton, among others.
“The fact that Trump didn’t want the State Department or members of the White House team to know what he was talking with Putin about suggests it was not about advancing our country’s national interest but something more problematic.”, Andrew S. Weiss, who was a Russia adviser to President Bill Clinton
“If you add up all these pieces, it’s a very damning picture at a minimum of how to handle national security,” said Mr. Weiss, who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “If there’s a more nefarious explanation, it’s obviously more disturbing.”
Chronology of Every Time Trump Has Talked to Putin
Includes: 4 Letters, 9 Phone Calls and 5 Meetings
1. July 7, 2017: Private Discussion at G-20 Meeting in Hamburg
Trump took away his interpreter’s notes and told the interpreter not to discuss the conversation.
2. July 7, 2017: Second Discussion at G-20 Meeting in Hamburg
No American translator
joined only by Mr. Putin’s translator.
3. Nov. 11, 2017: Brief Conversations at Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Meeting in Da Nang, Vietnam
Mr. Trump later said he asked Mr. Putin about Russian meddling in the 2016 election and that Mr. Putin denied it. “Every time he sees me he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’ and I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I think he is very insulted by it, which is not a good thing for our country.”
4. July 16, 2018: Two-Hour Private Meeting in Helsinki, Finland
#TreasonSummit
Mr. Trump met with Mr. Putin privately in their first formal summit meeting, accompanied only by their interpreters. The White House provided scant information about what was said, leaving even some administration officials in the dark. At a joint news conference afterward, Mr. Trump avoided criticizing Mr. Putin and questioned his own intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Democrats have called on Mr. Trump’s interpreters to testify about this meeting and others.
5. Nov. 30, 2018: Informal Conversation at G-20 Meeting in Buenos Aires
Mr. Trump abruptly canceled a planned meeting with Mr. Putin, citing concerns about Russian aggression toward Ukraine. Mr. Trump appeared to avoid Mr. Putin, even as they posed for a photograph together with other world leaders. But the two men eventually held a brief, “informal” conversation over dinner with other world leaders that evening, according to the White House. The dinner was closed to reporters.
One thing that is NOT a mystery came from the Helsinki Summit from Putin’s own lips!
REPORTER (Jeff Mason from Reuters): President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?
PUTIN: Yes, I did. Yes, I did.
