Putin's Increasing Leverage Over Trump

Last weekend's report in the Washington Post that Kremlin asset and corrupt narcissist Donald "Rump" Trump deliberately concealed the content of his one-on-one meetings with Russian thug Vladimir Putin, at one point ordering the U.S. interpreter to hand over the notes and not speak of the conversation to anyone after a 2017 meeting in Hamburg. That this country doesn't know what was discussed is bad enough. It's worse that the Russians know, and have those records for posterity. It's leverage that a corrupt and treasonous U.S. President just handed them gratis. From the Post this morning:

"The interpreters working for Soviet leaders were trained to take nearly verbatim stenographic notes. Declassified Soviet records of Cold War talks are often more detailed than official American notes on the same conversations, said Svetlana Savranskaya, the director of Russia programs at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. 

Savranskaya said she assumed Putin’s interpreters follow the Soviet tradition. Moscow, then, may well possess a far more detailed record of Putin’s talks with Trump than does Washington — where senior officials are said to be still searching for details about what exactly the two have discussed." (our emphasis)

That's a recipe for spreading disinformation and conducting blackmail on the part of the Russians, since there's no record on the American side, and who would believe Rump's account anyway? In addition, Russia isn't exactly forthcoming when it comes to historical records:

“The irony might be that in some years, historians will have the Russian record but not the American — and then we will learn something incredibly interesting just from the one side,” Savranskaya said in a phone interview. Trump, The Post reported, took possession of his interpreter’s notes after meeting with Putin in Hamburg in 2017.

But the Kremlin’s notes on Putin’s meetings with foreign leaders aren’t covered by any kind of automatic declassification regime, meaning that the fate of Russia’s Trump papers will depend on the future of Russia itself." (our emphasis)

Interestingly, Rump may have committed another crime after that Hamburg meeting if he destroyed a Government record. Add that to the long, long list.

(photo: Putin's expression says, "I've got this idiot in the palm of my hand.")