This month's bromantic "When Donald Met Vladimir" summit in Helsinki has become the newsmaking gift that keeps on giving.
We first realized the one-day summit's mind-boggling, mondo-bizzaro potential for discombobulation even before it began July 16 � when President Donald Trump decided to bar all of his top officials from his meeting with Russia's Vladimir Putin. Predictably, even today none of Trump's advisers really knows, precisely and accurately, what Trump agreed to during that two-hour private meeting (unless a secret recording was made).
Stunningly, the White House announced �� and then unannounced �� that Trump and Putin would hold a second summit, this one at the White House just days before the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. No one was more stunned to hear the summit was happening than National Intelligence Director Dan Coats, who heard it during a live event after he had chillingly declared Putin's Russian intelligence is still actively seeking to undermine the midterm elections through cyber-thefts and other means of covert interference. Predictably, the White House whispered bad things about Coats, yet, also predictably, postponed Putin's visit.
Meanwhile, a separate but seemingly significant summit side issue arose � one that raised the specter of Fake Newsmakers tampering with historic documents. The Atlantic magazine website's Uri Friedman scooped the world last week by reporting that the White House website's official transcript of the July 16 Trump-Putin press conference deleted part of a question that has often triggered Trump's hyper-sensitivity/compulsivity: a suggestion that Trump needed Russia's help to win the 2016 election.
Indeed, we had just seen Trump erupt over that issue at that Helsinki press conference yet again in responding to a question that made no such suggestion. Reuters correspondent Jeff Mason asked Putin about the special counsel's investigation of Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 election. And Trump rushed to answer first and began bragging about his victory in the Electoral College (exaggerating his victory margin). He insisted there was "no collusion" because he didn't even know Putin in 2016 so "there was nobody to collude with." And he ended with: "We ran a brilliant campaign, and that's why I'm president. Thank you."
Think about that �� this was the working mindset of a president who had just met for two hours alone with a Russian adversary. Putin responded with a long answer supportive of Trump. And that was when Mason asked what has become his crucial follow-up question.
REPORTER: "President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?"
PUTIN: "Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the US/Russia relationship back to normal."
That marked the first time Putin had publicly admitted he wanted Trump to win and had ordered his apparatchiks to help it happen. And that is where Trump's White House made its deletion.
Trump officials painstakingly deleted the first half of correspondent Mason's question ("President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election ...?"). But they kept the last half ("And did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?"). So Putin's "Yes I did. Yes I did" made no sense and carried no sting.
In Moscow, the Kremlin website simply made Mason's follow-up Q&A vanish entirely. Of course no one has suggested any collusion, but it just happened that Putin's Kremlin and Trump's White House made deletions in the identical spot.
If historians wanted to view a full trustworthy transcript and video, they could get it only from the folks Trump loves to lambaste as "Fake News" �� the mainstream media. Which means that, in Trump's parlance, the scholars ought to rebrand Trump and Putin as "Fake Newsmakers."
For a week after The Atlantic first reported the transcript deletion �� a scoop widely picked up in the mainstream media �� Trump's White House did nothing about it. But then a legal-issues website, journalist Dan Abrams' Law & Crime, reported multiple ways that Trump's White House transcript and video deletions might have violated federal laws on the preservation of documents and records.
Within hours, Trump's White House reversed, reinstated its deletions, and explained that it had happened just to get rid of translation crosstalk. Never mind that no crosstalk had impaired the mainstream media's unexpurgated versions.
While Trump's aides were scrambling to undelete and un-censor America's official transcript and video, their boss was in Kansas City, offering the Veterans of Foreign Wars some sage advice:
"Stick with us. Don't believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. ... What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening."
