Wednesday, January 16, 2019

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 gratisFrom 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.")

2 comments:

donnah said...

Letting Mueller untangle the many, many threads that connect Trump and his family and his legal team and his political supporters and his advisers has been frustrating for us, the citizens who are concerned and also convinced that these threads all lead back to one mass, Vladimir Putin. He's been pulling the strings all along, since the eighties, and I can't help believe that this is soon to be all untangled and released for our consideration.

There are just too many coincidences and crossovers and connections...let it all be revealed so we can send the guilty parties to prison.

Hackwhackers said...

donnah-- The upcoming report from the Special Counsel should be devestating, and one which should give pause to even loyal Trumpists. That's leaving out what the SDNY and various State attorneys general will come up with regarding Trump's criminal enterprise over the years.