Trump Colluded with Putin in Helsinki,
Hamburg, Took Hamburg Interpreter's
Notes
A similar issue arose in Helsinki, the setting for the first formal U.S.-Russia summit since Trump became president.
...Trump and Putin...met for two hours in private, accompanied only by their interpreters. Trump’s interpreter, Marina Gross, could be seen emerging from the meeting with pages of notes.
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During a joint news conference with Putin afterward, Trump...lashed out at the media and federal investigators...saying that he was persuaded by Putin’s “powerful” denial of election interference.
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Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with...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.
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The constraints that Trump imposed are part of a broader pattern by [him] of shielding his communications with Putin from public scrutiny and preventing even high-ranking officials in his own administration from fully knowing what he has told one of the United States’ main adversaries.
As a result, U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years. Such a gap would be unusual in any presidency, let alone one that Russia sought to install through what U.S. intelligence agencies have described as an unprecedented campaign of election interference.
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Trump allies said the president thinks the presence of subordinates impairs his ability to establish a rapport with Putin...
The meeting in Hamburg happened several months...Trump...told senior Russian officials during a meeting in the Oval Office...classified information about a terrorism plot, called former FBI director James B. Comey a “nut job” and said that firing Comey had removed “great pressure” on his relationship with Russia.
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It is not clear whether Trump has taken notes from interpreters on other occasions, but several officials said they were never able to get a reliable readout of the president’s two-hour meeting in Helsinki. Unlike in Hamburg, Trump allowed no Cabinet officials or any aides to be in the room for that conversation.
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the only detail that other administration officials were able to get from the [Hamburg] interpreter, officials said...[was] that Putin had denied any Russian involvement in the U.S. election and that Trump responded by saying, “I believe you.”
Senior Trump administration officials said that White House officials including then-National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster were never able to obtain a comprehensive account of the meeting, even from [then Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson.
“We were frustrated because we didn’t get a readout,” a former senior administration official said. “The State Department and National Security Council were never comfortable” with Trump’s interactions with Putin, the official said. “God only knows what they were going to talk about or agree to.”
Because of the absence of any reliable record of Trump’s conversations with Putin, officials at times have had to rely on reports by U.S. intelligence agencies tracking the reaction in the Kremlin.
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U.S. intelligence agencies have been reluctant to call attention to such reports during Trump’s presidency because they have at times included comments by foreign officials disparaging the president or his advisers, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, a former senior administration official said.
“The feedback tended not to be positive.” [said a former official in the White House]
