President Trump Had An Undisclosed Private Conversation With Vladimir Putin

WASHINGTON, DC — When President Trump sat down with Russian President Putin behind closed doors at the G20 summit in the first week of July, observers across the world furiously speculated about their discussion. Only the translators, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov knew the full details of the presidents' meeting, which ran more than an hour and a half over its scheduled 30 minutes.

But later that night, at a dinner for the heads of state of all G20, Trump and Putin met again informally for more than an hour, according to multiple reports, in a conversation that wasn't disclosed until Tuesday.

“Pretty much everyone at the dinner thought this was really weird," Ian Brenner of the consulting firm the Eurasia Group told the New York Times. "Here is the president of the United States, who clearly wants to display that he has a better relationship personally with President Putin than any of us, or simply doesn’t care.”

He added: "They were flummoxed, they were confused and they were startled.”

Trump lashed out at at the media when the news broke:

"Press didn't know you spent an hour during dinner in 1-1 discussion w Putin (& his translator)," Bremmer tweeted in response. "Other G20 leaders found it...unusual."

While calling the news "fake," the president did not in fact deny the contents of the reportage. No one denied that all G20 leaders were invited to the summit or portrayed the dinner itself as "sinister."

Rather, many observers noted that it was unorthodox for such a long conversation with a hostile foreign power to go on without the press being informed of its contents. According to the reports, Trump and Putin were joined only by a Kremlin translator, meaning there is no additional American with direct knowledge of the conversation. As the Trump campaign faces intense scrutiny over a meeting held with several Russian figures in an attempt to acquire dirt on Hillary Clinton, the president's own interactions with Putin are the subject of much interest and speculation.

"News of a second, unreported, private meeting between Presidents Trump and Putin raises a number of red flags, and the Administration needs to provide the American people information on this meeting at once," said Rep. Eliot Engel, a New York Democrat and ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. "What was discussed there that couldn't be covered in the first two-hour meeting? Why were no other Administration officials — not even an interpreter — present? And why did the White House keep this meeting a secret?"

Ben Rhodes, a former speechwriter and national security adviser to President Obama, noted on Twitter, "Obama White House used to read out these types of interactions with Putin at Summits given the public interest."

The White House issued a statement brushing off the story.

"There was no 'second meeting' between President Trump and President Putin, just a brief conversation at the end of a dinner," the statement said. "The insinuation that the White House has tried to 'hide' a second meeting is false, malicious and absurd."

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