Slate "Trump and Putin's Cone of Seclusion" (re lack of trump's notes)
It’s not just unusual that there are no notes from Trump’s meetings with Putin. It’s unprecedented.
By FRED KAPLAN
JAN 14, 20191:37 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/01/trump-putin-meeting-no-note-taker.html
The Washington Post’s Greg Miller reported Sunday that President Donald Trump’s confiscation of the translator’s notes from a one-on-one conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2017 was “unusual.” This is incorrect. It was unprecedented. There is nothing like it in the annals of presidential history.
It is also truly unusual that Trump failed to bring in a note taker, along with his translator, during his meetings with Putin, as almost every other president has done when meeting with foreign heads of state since the end of World War II. Usually the note taker is an official or aide with deep background in the subject under discussion.
Michael McFaul, who was President Barack Obama’s adviser on Russia, then his ambassador to Moscow, tells me that he routinely took notes in meetings between Obama and either Putin or his predecessor, Dmitry Medvedev. In some of these meetings, McFaul says, Obama took a few moments of “set-aside” time for a personal discussion with the Russian president; but in those instances, he briefed McFaul afterward, and McFaul then consulted with the translator to make sure that, in the notes of that debriefing, he got the wording as accurate as possible.
There are good reasons for presidents to bring a note taker with them to such meetings. First, they want a record of what was said, both to remind themselves later of what happened and to confirm or dispute some later account of the meeting, either by the foreign leader or some reporter. Second, the president’s national security officials want to know what was said so that they can orient policy accordingly. Third, historians value these notes, once they’re declassified, as a record of behind-the-scenes U.S. foreign policy.
snip - long and worth the read (and as with all things trump, terrifying)
one other paragraph to include
The irony—and perhaps the tragedy, for U.S. foreign policy and possibly (depending on what he did tell Putin) for Trump personally—is that the Russians, and probably the North Koreans, do have records of their one-on-one sessions with Trump. Putin did bring along a note taker. It is also likely that he or one of his aides tape-recorded the conversations. (The photograph of their tête-à-tête in Helsinki reveals a suspicious vase of flowers on the table between them.)
= new reply since forum marked as read
