Trump And Putin Had Previously Undisclosed Meeting At G-20
Is there anyone in the Trump Administration or family who hasn't held undisclosed meetings with Russians?
Last night, we learned that President Trump held a second, previously undisclosed, meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 meeting earlier this month:
WASHINGTON — Hours into a dinner with world leaders who had gathered for the Group of 20 summit meeting, President Trump left his chair at the sprawling banquet table and headed to where President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was seated.
The two presidents had met earlier in the day for the first time and, as the White House put it, had developed a rapport even as they talked about Russia’s interference in the United States’ 2016 elections.
The July 7 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, was the single most scrutinized of the Trump presidency. But it turned out there was another encounter: a one-on-one discussion over dinner that lasted as long as an hour and relied solely on a Kremlin-provided interpreter.
No presidential relationship has been more dissected than the one between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin, a dynamic only heightened by the swirl of investigations into whether Mr. Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to sway the election in his favor. Nevertheless, the meeting was confirmed by the White House only on Tuesday, after reports surfaced that some of the guests had been surprised that it occurred.
The dinner discussion caught the attention of other leaders around the table, some of whom later remarked privately on the odd spectacle of an American president seeming to single out the Russian leader for special attention at a summit meeting that included some of the United States’ staunchest, oldest allies.
A White House official said there was nothing unusual about it. And in two tweets late Tuesday, Mr. Trump derided news reports about it as “sick.” He said the dinner was not a secret, since all of the world leaders at the summit meeting and their spouses had been invited by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. “Press knew!” he tweeted.
“Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!” Mr. Trump added.
While the leaders-and-spouses dinner was on Mr. Trump’s public schedule, the news media was not allowed to witness any part of it, nor were reporters provided with an account of what transpired. Mr. Trump’s traveling press contingent did note, however, that his motorcade left the dinner four minutes after Mr. Putin’s did.
The dinner at which the private conversation took place stretched for more than three hours after a concert for the leaders and their spouses at the Elbphilharmonie, a concert hall on the banks of the Elbe River.
In the earlier, formal meeting, Mr. Trump said later, he asked the Russian president twice about his role in the American vote. Mr. Putin denied involvement, and the two men agreed to move beyond the dispute in the interest of finding common ground on other matters, including a limited cease-fire in Syria.
There is no official United States government record of the intimate dinner conversation, because no American official other than the president was involved.
“Pretty much everyone at the dinner thought this was really weird, that here is the president of the United States, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesn’t care,” said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a New York-based research and consulting firm, who said he had heard directly from attendees. “They were flummoxed, they were confused and they were startled.”
The encounter occurred more than midway through the lengthy dinner, when Mr. Trump left his chair and approached Mr. Putin, who had been seated next to the first lady, Melania Trump. It was described to Mr. Bremmer by other guests as lasting roughly an hour and not initially disputed by a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
But Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, disputed that account. He said Mr. Trump had described the exchange with Mr. Putin as purely social, and as lasting far less than an hour. “It was pleasantries and small talk,” Mr. Spicer said. In a separate statement, the White House said the two presidents had spoken through the Kremlin’s interpreter because the American translator with Mr. Trump did not speak Russian.
Experts in United States-Russia relations said such an encounter — even on an informal basis at a social event — was a concern because of its length, which suggested a substantive exchange, and because there was no note taker or national security or foreign policy aide present.
“We’re all going to be wondering what was said, and that’s where it’s unfortunate that there was no U.S. interpreter, because there is no independent American account of what happened,” said Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine who also specializes in Russia and nuclear arms control.
“If I was in the Kremlin, my recommendation to Putin would be, ‘See if you can get this guy alone,’ and that’s what it sounds like he was able to do,” added Mr. Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
To be fair, there isn’t necessarily anything unusual about American Presidents meeting with another world leader informally at one of these international gatherings, and the dinners and lunches that occur at events like the G-20 meeting are in some sense designed to encourage exactly this kind of contact between world leaders. What is unusual is the fact that Trump apparently didn’t have any similar conversations with other world leaders at the meeting, including the leaders of American allies like Great Britain, Germany, and France, or nearby neighbors such as Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. Additionally, the fact that Trump didn’t bring his own State Department translator along and instead relied on the Russian Government’s translator, which means both that the American President was relying on a Russian Government employee to translate what he was saying and that there is no independent record of what was discussed at the meeting. So, while I wouldn’t necessarily say there was anything suspicious about the meeting, the way is was conducted was amateurish and leaves the President open to being accused by the Russians of having agreed to things and there would be no independent American source to confirm or deny this.
Of course, any meeting between the President and the Russian leader is going to raise eyebrows. Not just because of the fact that we’re talking about the leaders of two important and adversarial powers but also because of the questions that have arisen regarding the Trump campaign’s contact with Russian officials before the November 2016 election. Over the past six months, we’ve learned that everyone from former Trump campaign adviser and National Security Council head Michael Flynn and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to Trump’s son Donald Jr. and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. As I joked last night when news of this meeting first broke, we’re at the point where it would perhaps be easier to ask which members of the Trump campaign and family didn’t have a meeting with a Russian official at this point.
I am shocked, shocked I tell you!
I mean, this was as predictable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.
At this point It would not surprise me if we come to find out that these discussions involved Russian financing for Trump and Kushner business interests.
Trump is an amazing grifter.
Also:
Assumes facts no longer in evidence.
My initial reaction to this was that it was a big nothing-burger. There were a lot of people around…on the surface it doesn’t seem very nefarious.
But the more I thought about it the more I saw the danger. Look, Trump is an idiot. And it looks like Putin is playing him like a fiddle.
Also out today is news that Dana Rohrbacher got direction from the Kremlin which attempted to…wait for it…ease sanctions.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-lawmaker-got-direction-from-moscow-took-it-back-to-dc
Now this was about the very same time that Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy were commenting about both Trump and Rorhbacher being on Putin’s payroll.
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?utm_term=.0e750755acf4
Coincidence?
We already know that one of the first things Trump did after his inauguration was to try to get the State Department to ease sanctions on Russia. We already know that Trump has been trying to give Russia back their compounds. And we already know the WH spent a week on the Hill lobbying Congress NOT TO INCREASE sanctions n Russia. And as far as anyone knows Trump is asking for nothing in return for these things. Some deal-maker, eh?
Who knows what the hell Putin was whispering in Trumps ear? It just gets ever-harder to believe that this is all innocent. Trump may very well be an innocent dupe; that’s incredibly believable. But I think Putin is intentionally taking advantage of that, and surreptitious meetings like this only make it easier.
That person was much more than a translator, I assure you. The only question is how high in the FSB hierarchy they sit.
There’s an interesting read at The Atlantic in which the reporter asked a number of Congressional Republicans what they really think of this Russia mess, under the umbrella of anonymity. It was fascinating, but also unsurprising in that they almost uniformly defended Trump and his co-conspirators by claiming that they were obviously so incompetent they had no idea what they were doing.
As for me, strong, strong suspicions sufficient to warrant serious and harsh investigation are given the change in the Republican plank on the Ukraine, the endless efforts to reduce Russian sanctions with benefit to the US even offered as an excuse, and the sickening sycophancy by Trump to Putin. The case is made even stronger by demonstrating the moral character necessary for a president to put his own interests ahead of the countries and that, given his history, he has had many many opportunities to be caught in the Kremlins web many times over.
The moral bankruptcy necessary to betray his country is in evidenced by many of his businesses which are simply cons to separate the gullible and desperate from their life savings, as well as the way he systematically loots his and others charities, and his obvious inability to tell truth from fiction or right from wrong. And the opportunity is confirmed by his long history with Russia, his previous (?) involvement with money laundering, and his close and continued association to a criminal that has essentially become a professional informer to the FBI on all matters of former SSR crime and corruption.
One other thing. Trump keeps on taking meetings with Russians at times that give really bad optics. I’m convinced that this is because he is being handled by the Russians (in the corrupt sense) and he is desperate to open up a communications channel. I suspect that was what Jared Kushner’s back channel was all about.
I’m thinking Tiffany.
It appears that she is the only one with enough sense to stay the fu@k away from that burning bag of dogcrap left on the front porch of America.
Her mom and her keep their distance. Smart folk.
@al-Ameda:
I wouldn’t think that works for these discussions. Even Trump is smart enough to want an MOU for something that important.
Sean Illing at VOX has an interview with Seva Gunitsky, who has been studying Trump for a decade. He pretty much confirms what many of us here have been saying, it’s his finances over the last many years that will sink Trump. Gunitsky says the political stuff is just lucky happenstance for the Russians, the real issue is a long history of laundering Russian oligarch money. A few months ago there was a long article in New Yorker about Trump Tower Baku which alleges the Trump organization has been ignoring the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act on a wholesale basis. The Act not only requires U. S. parties to refrain from corrupt practices, ii requires due diligence to ensure partners aren’t. It appears funding for the Iranian Republican Guards went through the project.
I’m hoping there’s some big smoking gun, the pee tape would do nicely, that will force the Trump voters to see reality, but I fear what we’ll get is a long list of complicated and technical sounding financial crimes. I expect a largely under the radar agreement for Trump to resign in exchange for not bankrupting his organization and his kids.
Trump is a traitor
Kushner and Junior are traitors
The Republican leadership who dismisses the Russia thing as a nothing burger are traitors
They are all just a different version of Aldridge Ames or Jonathon Pollard.
They should be treated as such
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl:
That is my opinion as well. It wasn’t nefarious of Trump, it was stupidity.
@Franklin:
It’s the arrogant stupidity of a guy who watches poker on TV (where you can see everyone’s hole cards) and heads off to Vegas because he thinks the game is so easy only an idiot would lose money.
That guy comes home wearing a barrel.
@gVOR08:
It has always been about the money. I’ll leave it at that.
This from Public Policy Polling:
More
This, after Donnie Jr. released the e-mails, and confirmed the meeting, himself.
How in the world are intelligent responsible people supposed to overcome such immense stupidity in such a huge portion of the electorate?
This Nation is so fwcked…
@Franklin:
How stupid? Putin did have his translator so he is free to say anything happened in that discussion and the translator is free to back him up. We only have Trumps word for what happened…which we have seen is worth bubkis. So once again, Putin has leverage over Trump. It’s really hard to make up how stupid the POTUS is.
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl: This Nation is so fwcked…
How fwcked? I’m not sure he wouldn’t win the election if it were held today. The Republicans no longer have any problem with an incompetent buffoon who would sell his family into slavery if it would benefit him. The problem the Democrats have is that a large number of people in this country don’t care at all about policy or competence, and no amount of messaging will get them to care.
And as long as the Koch brothers, Adelson, et al will spend $ billions to support the GOP they will hold their own.
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl:
Do the morons who don’t believe that Junior met with the Russians have an explanation for the fact that he said he did? Or that he himself released the emails?
Are they suggesting perhaps that the real Junior has been kidnapped/eliminated and that a ringer is making these claims?
Or that Hillary Clinton hacked Junior’s email account, wrote the incriminating messages, and told the ringer to release them to the Times?
Or does it all just fall under the rubric of Fake News?
@CSK:
Hillary has his children locked up in the basement of a DC Pizza shop.
@gVOR08: Alas, the response from the base to a pee tape would be “Wow@! He got Russian hookers (!!!) to pee while being taped? That’s amazing! The bull of the woods! That’s who Trump is!
After all, isn’t that why they’re called “the base?”
@Just ‘nutha ig’nint cracker:
Naw, they’d say it was a tape of Alec Baldwin.
@Daryl’s other brother Darryl:
In addition to trying to get rid of sanctions in return for…NOTHING…President Snowflake is going to end a CIA program arming and training rebels against Syrian leader Assad…something Putin has wanted for some time.
Quid meet Quo.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-ends-covert-cia-program-to-arm-anti-assad-rebels-in-syria-a-move-sought-by-moscow/2017/07/19/b6821a62-6beb-11e7-96ab-5f38140b38cc_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_no-name%3Apage%2Fbreaking-news-bar&tid=a_breakingnews&utm_term=.6c62f9d4cf56
@HarvardLaw92: At one point, I had wondered why the kind of grifting he could do in government would appeal to him. I realized later that I had no idea how much of his financial empire is leverage and monopoly money.
It now seems possible to me that POTUS is actually an increase in pay considering the fringe and perks.
@OzarkHillbilly: She’s operating the child slave camps on Mars, too.
@HarvardLaw92:
I never doubted that it was all about the money, going back a long way. Didn’t the Trump Taj Mahal have to pay a ten million dollar civil penalty for skirting the money laundering laws back to 2003?
Whose money was being laundered? Russian oligarchs’?
@Just ‘nutha ig’nint cracker: That’s probably why the Beagle 2 lander got shot down.
The comments so far do not address the fact the Trump has again caused serious damage to our intelligence services and their efforts to maintain a bulwark against foreign country attacks. First, it is clear that Trump WHEN A U.S. GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVE was present, disclosed to the Russian ambassador, top secret and highly sensitive information about Israeli sources gaining information from ISIS. Now, Trump has a personal meeting with Putin with ONLY A RUSSIAN TRANSLATOR present. This leaves our intelligence agencies completely UNAWARE of what, if anything, Trump revealed that could compromise our intelligence efforts. Tump is either a willing traitor or a dupe. Take your pick. Either way, he represents a threat to the security of this country.
@CSK:
One of the guys at the infamous Fredo-Jared-Manafort ‘adoption’ meeting was an established Russian money-launderer. I mean, in addition to Manafort. And probably Kushner.
@OzarkHillbilly: I hadn’t read about Beagle 2. Was that in the Weekly World News?
@dmichael:
Technically, he’s only a seditionist.
@michael reynolds:
Yes, I read that today. What a coincidence, right?
And here’s another tidbit for you all:
The National Enquirer has, after an exhaustive investigation, proven conclusively that the “evil” Hillary Clinton “framed” Donny Junior with respect to the Russia meeting. The Trumpkins over at Lucianne.com are high-fiving each other.
The paper of course neglects to reveal why Clinton didn’t use this information to torpedo Donny the Elder in the general election.
@Just ‘nutha ig’nint cracker: Beagle 2 Mars Lander: How It Was Lost and Found on Red Planet
I had it confused with the Mars Climate Orbiter which crashed because “spacecraft engineers failed to convert from English to metric measurements when exchanging vital data before the craft was launched, space agency officials said Thursday.
A navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the metric system of millimeters and meters in its calculations, while Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, which designed and built the spacecraft, provided crucial acceleration data in the English system of inches, feet and pounds.
As a result, JPL engineers mistook acceleration readings measured in English units of pound-seconds for a metric measure of force called newton-seconds.
In a sense, the spacecraft was lost in translation.”
My bad.
@Just ‘nutha ig’nint cracker: Beagle 2 Mars Lander: How It Was Lost and Found on Red Planet
I had it confused with the Mars Climate Orbiter which crashed because “spacecraft engineers failed to convert from English to metric measurements when exchanging vital data before the craft was launched, space agency officials said Thursday.
A navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the metric system of millimeters and meters in its calculations, while Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, which designed and built the spacecraft, provided crucial acceleration data in the English system of inches, feet and pounds.
As a result, JPL engineers mistook acceleration readings measured in English units of pound-seconds for a metric measure of force called newton-seconds.
In a sense, the spacecraft was lost in translation.”
My bad.
@Just ‘nutha ig’nint cracker:
You still don’t, and unfortunately I’m debarred from saying much of anything specific to further enlighten you.
Suffice to say that, post 1992, nobody (and I do mean nobody) in New York or London/Paris would lend anything to him, either personally or to any companies controlled by him. That tap was slammed shut, and it remains so today, so he obtained capital anywhere he could find it. None of those are sources you’d want on your balance sheet,
About the only places he can obtain financing these days are a shadowy subprime REIT and Deutsche’s pathetically desperate private banking division, along with a few shitty little nothingbanks in New Jersey.
Now, aside from the lingering questions (and stink) with regard to just where Ladder Capital managed its capital raises, along with the hidden information with regard to just who the participating partners are in many of these deals (you can guess …), the more important question is: where does his cash flow originate from? Just who is buying apartments & commercial space from this man, at what discount relative to market, and to what extent are these entities automagically loss indemnified at resell?
Or, put another way, when we see the same Ukrainians and Russians buying blocks of apartments in Trump properties that are capitalized largely without the participation of commercial lending (the lenders above tend to refinance his projects in order to allow for the mining of equity – they almost entirely don’t finance construction for him), the questions become clear:
Where is the construction capital coming from, and why do the same Ukrainians and Russians seem to love buying blocks of his apartments?
You can fill in the blanks. Follow the money. It has always been about the money. The rest of this sideshow – the political aspects – are entertaining, but they won’t be what brings him down.
Follow the money …
The delusion which is the Trump supporter is payback for the delusion of the Dems during the Monica sex scandal.
Only a true partisan could support Bill Clinton staying on as President as he was an embarrassment. At the time, I called for him to resign immediately for staining the office of POTUS by putting a cigar up the cooch of an intern!!!!!
I was amazed at how many Dems supported this obscene behavior with the “yeah, but its no one’s business…..or…he didn’t do anything illegal bla bla.
My Republican friends would ask quite rightly “What does a President have to do before you liberals will stop defending his behavior?”
Of course they were right. No way you defend his Oval Office blow jobs. And by stepping down and making Gore President, we would have had President Gore vs Dumbya….a race he wouldn’t have lost with the added legitimacy of being President. And history would be quite different now if Gore wins that election.
But Bill, the true boomer he is, could never admit to it till caught red handed, and even then was willing to drag down the country to save his own selfish ends.
Now we have the shoe on the other foot. Look at a wingnut who says “yeah, but what Donald Jr. did wasn’t illegal.” Blatant delusion, but then so was the Dems rallying around a sex pervert only because the GOP was out to get him.
The two sides don’t care anymore about right/wrong..if my side does it, its right.
And I am sure that some here will comment about how different these two issues are…thereby confirming my theory of delusion on both sides.
@CSK:
I assume most of them don’t even know about Junior’s emails. These are low-info people, in general.
@OzarkHillbilly: You’re doing better than I am on that point. I’d never even heard of the Beagle 2. I was just riffin’ off’n your “shot down” comment.
@the Q: You do realize your idol FDR was also carrying on an extramarital affair while he was president?
@the Q: Well, they are different. Clinton was super-intelligent, with a grasp of issues which invariably exceeded those around him. Trump is an idiot. Clinton’s scandal was about sex. Trump’s is about compromising US elections, being obligated to an antagonistic foreign power, and use of the office for personal gain. Clinton, during the time the scandal was being pursued, worked very hard at governing. Trump takes vacations, goes to parties and generally does nothing but blather and tweet.
according to Public Policy Polling:
Reality is for dumbass libtarts.
@the Q: Were you the one that caused me to make a post detailing the extramarital affairs of half the previous presidents including your idol FDR? Seriously over half the presidents we’ve had in the USA have been caught having affairs…
I really wish you would tell us someday the REAL reason why you hate the last name Clinton so much.
@Matt: I also find it kind of amazing that sticking a cigar up a “cooch” is somehow just as bad as Trump’s selling out to a hostile foreign power while also helping that foreign power improve on their ability to manipulate and control our elections…
Apparently in Q’s world
Cigar up cooch = treason