Trump’s private chat with Putin
What happened
The White House this week defended a previously undisclosed, lengthy private conversation President Trump held with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit. The president’s chat with Putin took place in Hamburg earlier this month toward the end of a dinner with world leaders. Hours after an earlier meeting in which the two men had discussed, among other things, accusations that Moscow meddled in the 2016 election, the president sought out his Russian counterpart at the banquet. Trump and Putin talked for roughly an hour, relying only on a Kremlin interpreter, foreign officials told Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. Other leaders thought it “weird,” Bremmer said, that a U.S. president tried “to display that he has a better relationship personally with Putin than any of us.” Trump said on Twitter that news reports of a “secret dinner” with Putin were “sick.”
New information emerged about Donald Trump Jr.’s 2016 meeting with Kremlin-linked figures promising damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Two additional people, it was revealed, were among the eight attendees at the Trump Tower sit-down: Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-born U.S. lobbyist who previously worked for Soviet intelligence, and Ike Kaveladz, who was investigated in 2000 for allegedly laundering Russian money in the U.S. President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then–campaign manager Paul Manafort were also present at the meeting, where Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya allegedly promised dirt on Clinton. Special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian election interference, is now reportedly looking into the meeting.
What the editorials said
Trump has defended Don Jr.’s get-together with the Russians as just “politics,” said The Baltimore Sun. “No, it’s not.” Seeking information from someone purportedly working for a hostile power to influence an election is far from normal—it might even violate a law prohibiting campaigns from soliciting anything of value from a foreign national. Trump’s core supporters may believe this was no big deal. “But the rest of us aren’t fooled.”