There were the hand gestures (perhaps meaning call me, perhaps meaning to be as offensive as those pixelated in Stephen Colbert's late night re-enactment, below). Trump made them from his assigned seat between the Prime Minister of Japan's wife Akie Abe, and the President of Argentina's wife Juliana Awada -- openly and enthusiastically, as I understand it, in Vladimir Putin's general direction. There is the ongoing suspicion that Mrs. Abe pretended not to speak English (she speaks it fluently, but he reported that she didn't even know how to say "hello") which, if true, could believably have been in an effort to avoid an unwanted conversation.
Now, why would any civilized woman want that? Maybe what he said to certain other women of the G20 has something to do with it -- or how he said it. Trevor Noah reports.
There is the infamous second meeting. Trump soon gave up on subtlety altogether, broke script, and got up and sat next to Putin. This meeting was observed to go on for an hour, despite the fact that Trump subsequently told The New York Times it lasted only fifteen minutes. Time flies when you are having fun.
But this post is not about any of that, hyperlinked, of course, above, for the curious. This post is about the official meeting, the one that went two hours -- twice as long as scheduled -- about which Rachel Maddow had much to say.
MADDOW: So, tonight, “The New York Times” has just published an interview with the president of the United States, in which he has threatened the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and he has threatened the – he`s threatened special counsel Robert Mueller, saying he might fire him. He`s also expressed grave criticism about his attorney general and deputy attorney general.
But he`s also made another kind of news that is of serious intelligence concern. When President Trump met with the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador in the Oval Office, remember that? You`ll remember that shortly thereafter, we learned that in that meeting, he had, A, bragged to those Russian officials that he just fired the FBI director to take the pressure off himself when it came to the Russia investigation, and B, we learned that he gave those Russian officials code word protected super-secret information about the fight against ISIS. And how one of our allies had managed to infiltrate and/or surveil ISIS in a way that nobody knew about, and he told the Russians.
It was information that was super sensitive, that would – was perceived as potentially jeopardizing that very important surveillance and/or infiltration if anybody knew about it. Nobody in the U.S. government was supposed to tell anybody about it, particularly the Russians. The president spilled the beans in that meeting.
The reason we found out that he did that is because there was a note taker in that meeting. And when the president made those remarks to the Russians, somebody wrote it down and then when those notes were circulated inside the White House, or among senior administration officials, somebody was sufficiently alarmed that it became – somebody was sufficiently alarmed that it became news.
I mean, A, leaked to the press, but B, presumably the fact that the president had told the Russians that, once it was known, like at the CIA, and at the NSA, and national security counsel, that could become a point of action, if a source need to be removed from the battlefield, if somebody needed to be protected, if the people whose intelligence the president had just given away needed to be warned about that, that could be set in motion, a sort of cleanup operation – all because there was a note-taker here. Otherwise, how would we have known he gave that away.
Well, when the president met one-on-one with Vladimir Putin at the G20, we were told there was no note-taker at the first official formal conversation that he had with Vladimir Putin. But we know for sure there was no note taker there. And there was no U.S. official there at all, not even a translator, for the president`s second long conversation with Vladimir Putin, that the White House never acknowledged until it was reported in the press yesterday...
Now, I recall her going on to say that the first, official meeting was reported immediately to the Russian media, and that no such report to the American media was made. I have scoured the transcripts of the show, to no avail, for this passage, since it was this detail that launched the internet search whose fruits I present below.
I wanted to know just what was presented to the Russian media about that meeting. I thought the difference in perspective would be very ...interesting... -- as indeed it turned out to be.
The third issue is cyber security which was understandably given considerable attention. The presidents agreed that this area is becoming ever more dangerous. There are numerous threats emerging in cyber space, including a terrorist threat, threats in other areas of organised crime, such threats to the normal functioning of societies as child pornography, pedophilia, the so-called suicide networks. Of course, President Trump also mentioned that certain circles in the United States keep on spinning the issue of Russia’s interference in the US elections even though they are unable to prove that.
Hot from the Kremlin to you. Judge for yourself.
Comments welcome, as always.
Be seeing you.
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