How would we know what really happened?
by digby
Marcy Wheeler notes an important detail:
Thankfully, the NYT has finally revealed that it was Trump, not Putin, who chose to limit attendees.
Only six people attended the meeting itself: Mr. Trump and his secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson; Mr. Putin and his foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov; and two interpreters.
The Russians had agitated to include several more staff members in the meeting, but Mr. Trump’s team had insisted that the meeting be kept small to avoid leaks and competing accounts later, according to an administration official with direct knowledge of the carefully choreographed meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity around the matter.
And he did so specifically to avoid leaks about what would transpire.
It is therefore, not possible to totally believe the read-out of this meeting. Unless you think Trump and Tillerson and Putin and Lavrov would never lie.
Marcy believes that it was specifically to keep McMaster out. He did it before with Netanyahu. Remember, he thinks McMaster is a "pain" who talks too much.
Update: Well, that's that.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Friday told press that President Trump opened his 140-minute meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin by discussing Kremlin interference in the 2016 election. Additionally Tillerson—who was in the room for the conversation—relayed that the meeting was “rightly focused on how do we move forward from something that may be an intractable disagreement at this point.” Additionally, Tillerson said, “There was a very clear positive chemistry between the two... There was not a lot of re-litigating things from the past.” According to The New York Times’ Moscow bureau chief, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed President Trump accepted statements from Putin that the Kremlin did not hack the 2016 election.
Of course he did. They need to move on now to important things like how Trump can reward his new friend for all his help.
This is really creepy. Not that I expected anything better. But still. You are witnessing something historic here and not in a good way. The president of the United States was helped in his election campaign by a foreign government and it appears that he's just telling the American people to go fuck themselves if they don't like it. There's not a damned thing they can do about it.
Wow.
.
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