Trump has concealed details of his face-to-face encounters with Putin from senior officials in admin

[MBS]

Source: Washington Post.

President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said.

Trump did so after a meeting with Putin in 2017 in Hamburg that was also attended by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. U.S. officials learned of Trump's actions when a White House adviser and a senior State Department official sought information from the interpreter beyond a readout shared by Tillerson.

The constraints that Trump imposed are part of a broader pattern by the president of shielding his communications with Putin from public scrutiny and preventing even high-ranking officials in his own administration from fully knowing what he has told one of the United States' main adversaries.
As a result, U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump's face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years. Such a gap would be unusual in any presidency, let alone one that Russia sought to install through what U.S. intelligence agencies have described as an unprecedented campaign of election interference.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is thought to be in the final stages of an investigation that has focused largely on whether Trump or his associates conspired with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. The new details about Trump's continued secrecy underscore the extent to which little is known about his communications with Putin since becoming president.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-has-concealed-details-of-his-face-to-face-encounters-with-putin-from-senior-officials-in-administration/2019/01/12/65f6686c-1434-11e9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html?utm_term=.72a9560d5082

---

WOW.

update, 12 hours later: This article is now about 4-5X longer than the original online article. Added material includes administration's attempts to defend itself, details about the interpreters, and reaction from various congressional representatives and security experts.

[ck4829]

1. K&R. I'm just surprised the linguist hasn't been in some "unfortunate accident" yet.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

66. She hasn't been subpoenaed by a House committee yet.

Last edited Mon Jan 14, 2019, 06:24 AM - Edit history (1)

If subpoenaed, she should be very careful about crossing the street, standing too close to upper-story windows, that sort of thing.

[MBS]

88. tweet from Rep.Swalwell (Jan 13)

Link to tweet

Six months ago, @RepAdamSchiff and I tried to subpoena the interpreter from the Trump-Putin meeting. The GOP blocked us. We knew then something was fishy. We now know Trump took the notes. Lost time and more damage to our democracy is the cost of GOP obstruction.
1:56 PM - 13 Jan 2019

JULY 19 2018 from Adam Schiff:

Link to tweet

BREAKING: @RepSwalwell and I just made a motion in House Intel Committee to subpoena the American interpreter during the summit — the only witness to Trump’s meeting with Putin. This is an extraordinary remedy, but Trump’s actions necessitate it.

Republicans voted it down.
6:14 AM - 19 Jul 2018

[sarcasmo]

77. Marina Gross is her name.

[MarcoZandrini]

79. She....

...needs to meet with Mueller.

In Mueller I trust.

[spinbaby]

80. She...

Needs a body guard, a food taster, and a spot in the witness projection program.

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

2. Good thing the note taker can still testify.

[brush]

27. Yes, I hope she/he is called soon, before some "accident" happens.

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

28. Gosh. Such a relief to know something has begun to happen.

It confirms what we all knew. Which is another relief. Being told you are wrong in the face of stark fact, day after day for over a year...wow. What a huge detour from the momentum America has globally.

[brush]

32. It does seem it's starting happen. Dems taking the House seems to have spurred...

some in the media to do their jobs in revealing the rot in the WH and the repug party.

[Leghorn21]

3. No shocker,

but keep it comin’, free press - pour it ON

[NurseJackie]

4. Trump is a traitor. A Russian spy is in the Oval Office.

[CountAllVotes]

15. +1

alas.

Sad it had to get this bad and go this far.

[NurseJackie]

22. I blame Russia, the GOP, and a few others.

I'll never forget their treachery.

[Gothmog]

50. Treasonous Trump Hides Details Of Putin Meetings From His Own Government

Link to tweet

[nini]

24. What amazes me is how some are so surprised to hear this and won't believe it.

Even before those Russian 'officials' had that closed door meeting in the oval office it was pretty obvious. He hasn't hid a lot of this.. it's been right in front of everyone's face. The sanctions, the visits, siding with Putin against our allies. He's flaunts it. Just imagine what we don't know that the FBI does.

There's a reason the GOP has sat on their hands for the last 2 years.. they're all involved too. I want them all lined up before a firing squad - I'd pay to see that.

This pic.. he hasn't hid any of this

[htuttle]

34. There's a lot to read in those faces

Not just Trump's.

[calimary]

78. Who's yer daddy, donald?

[alittlelark]

5. Supboena the translator..... ASAP, like NOW or Yesterday....

We were screaming about it on DU when it happened - the media has finally (hopefully) caught up.....

This situation is not 'he said she said' 'political', it is dead serious.

[pangaia]

51. Maybe DU 'should' have a media news arm, or 2.

We could call it, oh, I don;t know.. How about, "DU YOU BELIEVE IT YET?"

[TeamPooka]

6. A subpoena is getting ready for the translators as we speak, I hope.nt

[Botany]

7. The man is a traitor to his country

He, his family, and all the others who worked with Russia to install this saboteur
and all those other republicans need to be in jail

[LuckyLib]

8. No administration representatives, even the pResident, should be able to hold

meetings without witnesses. Interpreters are necessary, and they are working. Other listeners need to be present. No secret meetings EVER.

[Scurrilous]

9. K&R

[Fiendish Thingy]

10. This issue, all by itself, deserves a Benghazi-level investigation

Hopefully, there is a Congressional subpoena in the interpreter’s future...

[KPN]

67. THIS.

[janx]

11. I wonder if anyone from Mueller's team

has talked to Tillerson.

[orangecrush]

12. K&R

[bluecollar2]

13. The translator should be in protective custody...n/t

[MBS]

14. I sure hope he is. n/t

[dalton99a]

17. For the two-hour secret meeting in Helsinki, it was Marina Gross

She works for the State Department. Democrats should subpoena her ASAP.

[bluecollar2]

33. Well she should be in protective custody...

Witnesses have an unfortunate habit of meeting premature ends in scenarios involving Russians, the KGB, and their minions.

[RockRaven]

16. This is the behavior of a totes innocent person, btw.

Nothing to see here... move along.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

18. Wow and more. . . . nt

[kentuck]

19. The FBI had no choice but to investigate.

He was leaving too many crumbs.

It would have been dereliction of duty if they did not investigate.

[Generic Brad]

21. He's not leaving crumbs

He's laying out a trail of loaves!

[Fuzzpope]

20. Okie dokey

HOW MUCH MORE SHIT DO PPL NEED TO SEE, FFS.

OUT, DAMN SPOT.

[UpInArms]

23. Flashback to the sentence for treason

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

The United States Federal Bureau of Prisons did not operate an execution chamber when the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death. They were transferred to New York State's Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, for execution. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted by executioner Joseph Francel at sundown on June 19, 1953.[39][40]

The execution was delayed from the originally scheduled date of June 18, because Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas had granted a stay of execution on the previous day. That stay resulted from intervention in the case by Fyke Farmer, a Tennessee lawyer whose efforts had previously been scorned by the Rosenbergs' attorney, Emanuel Hirsch Bloch.[41]

[blugbox]

68. As crazy as that is, they weren't even executed for treason

They were tried and executed for espionage!! For spying!

I can legit see several people being guilty of exactly that in our current situation. No joke. I don't think anyone will be going down for treason realistically, but i KNOW we have several people providing Russia with info for sure

[Enoki33]

25. More actions that add to the evidence the monster qualifies as another

of Putin’s oligarchs. It keeps getting more frightening.

[muriel_volestrangler]

26. Kevin McCarthy: "There's two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/house-majority-leader-to-colleagues-in-2016-i-think-putin-pays-trump/2017/05/17/515f6f8a-3aff-11e7-8854-21f359183e8c_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f06f892a7609

Now, of course, House Minority Leader. Rohrabacher seemed like a good call:

Among the contacts that have raised eyebrows:

An April 2016 meeting in Moscow with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin-connected lawyer who, two months later, would participate in the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort.

A meeting with the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange shortly before Assange released a trove of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee.

Several meetings with Maria Butina, now charged with being a Russian agent, and at least one meeting with Butina’s associate, Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of the Russian central bank who sought to set up a back-channel meeting between Putin and Trump during the campaign.

On top of that, Rohrabacher accepted a campaign contribution from Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign manager now cooperating with Mueller following his conviction on multiple charges of tax fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy, and another from George O’Neil, a conservative fundraiser suspected of helping Butina funnel Russian funds into the US electoral system via the National Rifle Association

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/10/dana-rohrabacher-loses-congressional-seat-orange-county-russia-putin

And this just adds to the list here: The Questions Are Not What Did The President Know And When Did He Know it? The Question Is What, If Anything, Would The President Be Doing Differently If We Knew For Certain That He Was A Russian Asset Or Agent?

[alfredo]

29. I thought he didn't allow an American to do the Translation, only a Russian.

[Igel]

45. A lot of people have made this kind of claim.

Don't recall it specifically for this event. But it's unlikely that no US interpreter was present.

What use her notes would be to anybody but her is unknowable without looking at them.

In my consecutive interpretation class we were put in positions where we had to pretend to be the interpreter. (Yes, what she was doing was consecutive interpretation, a kind of conference interpretation. It's best for diplomatic talks. Fewer mistakes are made.)

Idiots decided to just "remember" what was said.

Fools decided to try to write everything down.

Greater fools decided to use standard orthography.

Over time, we all devised our own shorthand. Some took notes in the source language; others in the target language; most mixed the languages, doing part of the language shift as they took notes and somehow pointing out the things to think through during brief gaps in speech. Some used a self-devised shorthand. Those with better memories took fewer notes. Most focused on the paper--there's no point in looking at the speaker unless you need to, and you got to think about how to recast source text in the other language--sometimes substituting idioms, trying to find parallel proverbs, or even at times moving whole chunks of text to try to keep the meaning the same. Most had their handwriting degrade rather quickly from speed. And we quickly learned that the seconds when it's clear that the first speaker is done are golden.

To look at another's notes, esp. for nuance, would most likely be crazy. Even to reconstruct what was said might be hard for anybody but her. Not that people wouldn't try, consider their interpretations factual, and get things wrong. By now she probably has her note-taking reduced to a consistent form, but perhaps not. It's hard to know how long she's been at that particular job.

Also keep in mind that the interpreter is considered to be mostly an extension of the air. The air is the medium, a conduit, nothing more, so whatever an interpreter thinks about his/her client should never enter into the conversation. The only time the interpreter is actively engaged with a client(s) is when s/he needs feedback about something or perhaps advising on process or has some insight and asks if s/he can share it. If the answer is 'no', then the interpreter goes back to being a conduit and nothing more. An example of "feedback" might be whether the client wants confirmation that the other interpreter is accurate or how the message was skewed, or whether an attempt should be made to keep style, idioms, jokes, that sort of thing, or just summarize a bit or a lot.

[alfredo]

61. I saw it as trump not trusting the American translator.

[MBS]

89. At dinner with Putin in Hamburg July 2017, he used only Putin's interpreter

See https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/what-we-know-trump-putin-meetings

[MBS]

65. I also remember one instance when he just used the Russian interpreter.

Can't remember which encounter it was - but I do think it was only one of them. And I remember being outraged and worried (OK, freaked out) at the time.

As several people have noted on this thread, many of us had long noticed and worried about Trump's strange insistence on privacy and lack of ordinary record keeping of Putin meetings. But what this article does, to absolutely damning effect, is to lay out the consistency of the pattern, and to emphasize the bizarre and unprecedented level of secrecy is (keeping facts from the SoS, the security council, and all other close aides?! taking the interpreter's notes! swearing the interpreter to secrecy!) - all of this made much worse by the identity of the partner (Putin) and the highly suspicious, presumably treasonous, nature of the conversation itself.
And coming so soon after the report about FBI counterintelligence (was the timing of these two stories coordinated in any way? Makes me wonder whether the intelligence community has now had enough) . . .surely, surely, his treachery, and that of his enablers, should be incontrovertible now.

[alfredo]

82. If the DoJ buries Mueller's report or make changes, can the House subpoena the report?

[MBS]

85. I've been fervently hoping so, but I don't know the answer. n/t

[Honeycombe8]

30. Well, if there's no law against it, the Trump admin. will do.

Heck, even if there IS a law against it, they'll do it.

[KY_EnviroGuy]

31. I expect to hear the phrase "executive privilege" tossed about...

with increasing frequency. Lumped in with "national security" and other false shields from telling us the truth.

............

[Stuart G]

35. Oh Oh......Not good for Mr. Trump. ... NO GOOD FOR MR. TRUMP

LET'S SAY IT ANOTHER WAY......very bad for Mr. Trump.......So bad...that..it could be.........

...................An IMPEACHABLE OFFENSE................................

This is it friends...we have moved into the last couple of acts in this play, perhaps the very last act...
...To have conversations with Mr. Putin, an advisory, with no record of content of the conversation....
....Or even informing the public that he had those 5 face to face conversation...Now what do you suppose?
.........I wonder what the news will be about this on the Sunday news shows?

....Now I wonder if Trump wanted to keep the fact of the 5 conversations secret???What do you think?
.................Well, Well...and these are...."..face to face conversations....."
......................Say it ain't so.....What did Mr. Trump say to Mr. Putin...?
........................Why did Mr. Trump desire to keep those conversations totally secret?

....................................... I don't know, Do you?

[dalton99a]

36. There is so much to hide.

[barbtries]

37. well no shit.

whatever they talked about my guess proves the DOJ was completely on the trail when they started investigating the president for working for russia.

jeez we are fucked. #SaveTheCountry

[underpants]

38. I looked but did t see your post. This is big news.

I'll try to redirect to your post

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100211663119

[N_E_1 for Tennis]

39. He needs to be gone...

It was bad before but this week made it imperative that he be ousted. Screw protocol, just usher him out. This country is “we the people” that sick insane traitor is our employee we should be allowed to go get him.

[elleng]

40. The Times and The Post,

moving right along!

[regnaD kciN]

54. This story complements the NYT one...

That one raised the question of whether Trump was knowingly or unwittingly working for Russia.

I’d say this story answers that question.

[elleng]

55. Yes

[femmedem]

41. I'm fascinated that this is all coming out now.

Regardless of why people are speaking to the press now, this is laying the groundwork for a wider swath of the public to believe the Mueller report, and giving cover for the GOP to support the Dems in impeachment.

[Pepsidog]

43. Interesting analysis. Better take Pence out to.

[MBS]

64. Really good points, thanks.

Timing is interesting, for sure.
Here's hoping also that this damning news will wake up the sleeping portion of the public and also persuade a critical number of Republicans to develop a conscience and a spine.

[Pepsidog]

42. Traitor

[FirstLight]

44. where is the outrage...?

Oh, right...we are on outrage overload...

IMPEACH NOW!

[suffragette]

46. Glad to be the 100th Rec.

[Blue Owl]

47. Whatchya got under the rug there, Donald?

n/t

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

48. Maybe he didn't want the intimate details of their relationship exposed

[Gothmog]

49. Trump swore interpreter to secrecy after Putin meeting and took away notes:

Link to tweet

[underpants]

52. Yes. Not just looking back but at the time that sent up flags

I saw you posted this on my thread - without deleting it I'm letting it die since MBS got this first.

Coupled its The NY Times article this is beyond damning.

[meadowlander]

59. Pretty sure there isn't a section of the Presidential Records Act that covers

pinky swears.

How can you be that shitty at crime and stay out of jail for 72 years?

[DeminPennswoods]

53. Wow!

Paints a damning picture in conjunction with the NYT story.

[SunSeeker]

56. If I was one of those linguists, I'd be worried that Trump or Putin would off me.

Those linguists are the only evidence of the crimes committed in those meetings...unless Putin taped them.

[Gothmog]

57. This is amusing

Link to tweet

?s=20

[BigmanPigman]

62. I think I recently read that tRump was referred to as "agent trump"

by some Russians.

[saidsimplesimon]

70. Pathetic lapdog is more accurate.

[MBS]

71. Vanity Fair agrees:

from article by Bess Levin on Mnuchin:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/01/mnuchin-tells-democrats-to-just-trust-trump-on-russia

Why does Donald Trump treat Russia with the sort of slobbering canine deference typically reserved for the special relationship between a golden retriever and its master? This is the question that many have asked over the last two years, as the president of the United States has leaked confidential information about classified intelligence to Russian envoys; undermined his own U.N. ambassador by telling the Kremlin not to worry about any punishment she promised would be meted out for heinous acts; begged for Russia to be allowed back in the G7 after it was kicked out for invading another European country; and literally sided with Vladimir Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies on the matter of election meddling. This pattern of servile behavior—which comes in stark contrast to the treatment actual U.S. allies receive—has led some people to wonder if the president is somehow compromised, whether financially or in some other fashion. . . .

[saidsimplesimon]

72. thanks MBS

Mnuchin is proof there is no honor among thieves and criminals.

[bdamomma]

58. K&R

He's a Russian agent period.

[world wide wally]

60. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump admits it and then argues that working for Russia doesn't break any

Laws.

[Gothmog]

63. Subpoena the interpreter

Link to tweet

?s=20

[Maxheader]

69. Wonder what part of cheetox's brain

Is starting to break down....trying to contain, retain...justify the actions?
There have been so many...

Same crimes committed by a democrat? With a winger controlled congress?
Be in jail by now wouldn't they?

[LiberalFighter]

73. Gee I wonder if Mueller has already taken testimony from the translators?

[MBS]

75. I've been hoping that this might be the case. n/t

[WhoWoodaKnew]

74. This is all Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh's fault.

[sarcasmo]

76. House Dems, subpoena Marina Gross, now!

[CountAllVotes]

81. Good!

I'm sure the translator knows the truth about what was said by dump!

[Talitha]

83. Hopefully she's already talked to Mueller

Hopefully she's already talked to Mueller and is being protected.
One thing for sure: if I were her I'd have RUN to the FBI -
ASAP.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

84. Wow, since the Dem landslide in the House, we're really seeing action!

Thankfully!!

[red dog 1]

86. K&R, thanks for posting

VERY important story, imo.

[MBS]

87. my feeling as well.

especially combined with the NYT story about the FBI counterterrorism group probing the possibility in 2017 that * was a witting or unwitting Russian asset.