In another blockbuster revelation, this time from the Washington Post, it's being reported that Russian asset and demagogue Donald "Rump" Trump has been deliberately concealing records of his conversations with Russian thug and autocrat Vladimir Putin:
"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.After it was revealed yesterday that the FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation into whether Rump was acting as a Russian agent, his private communications with Putin take on new importance:
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." (our emphasis)
"'Trump’s secrecy surrounding Putin 'is not only unusual by historical standards, it is outrageous,'said Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state now at the Brookings Institution, who participated in more than a dozen meetings between President Bill Clinton and then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s. 'It handicaps the U.S. government — the experts and advisers and Cabinet officers who are there to serve [the president] — and it certainly gives Putin much more scope to manipulate Trump.'”One of the first witnesses that should be called by the House Intelligence Committee is the American interpreter that Rump used for his two-hour private meeting with Putin in Helsinki. After the meeting, Putin emerged with his chest out and a smirk on his face; Rump loped into the press room looking sheepish and worried (see image above).
