Trump Lawyers: Tax Returns Show No Income from Russia “With Few Exceptions”

President Trump’s lawyers on Friday said that Trump’s last 10 years of tax returns do not reveal “any income of any type from Russian sources” with some exceptions but refused to release copies of his tax returns to verify.

The claim was made in a letter sent to Trump from his attorney at Morgan Lewis. The letter was obtained Friday but dated March 8, 2017. The letter was also sent to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), as White House press secretary Sean Spicer stated at Tuesday’s press briefing.

The letter says that “with a few exceptions,” Trump’s tax returns show no equity investment by Russians into Trump entities or any debt owed by Trump to lenders. Trump did receive income from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant held in Moscow and a property sold to a Russian billionaire for $95 million.

he report sparked backlash online as many questioned the “with few exceptions” caveat and continued calls for Trump to release his tax returns.

Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.), a leader of Democratic efforts to release Trump’s tax returns, tweeted “exceptions?” following the report.

Congressional Democrats have repeatedly pushed the tax return issue in Congress. They’ve argued that it’s important to see Trump’s tax returns to learn about his potential ties to Russia and that lawmakers need to know how he would benefit from any tax-reform legislation.

Earlier this year, House Democrats offered resolutions for six consecutive weeks that would direct the House to request Trump’s tax returns from the Treasury Department. In April, they started an effort to force a House floor vote on a bill to require presidents and presidential nominees to disclose their tax returns.

While a number of Republican lawmakers have said they want Trump to release his tax returns, most have been reluctant to join Democrats’ efforts on the topic. They’ve said that Trump should release his returns voluntarily and that it’s not against the law for Trump to keep them private.

The public last month also joined in calls for Trump to release his tax returns, with tens of thousands turning out for Tax Day protests across the U.S.

Earlier this week, Trump hinted he would not release his tax returns until after he left office.

(h/t The Hill)

Donald Trump Threatens James Comey, Implies He Illegally Taped Conversations

President Donald Trump implied on Friday that he may have recorded conversations with former FBI Director James Comey.

In a tweet, Trump issued a threat to Comey over “leaking to the press.”

Trump’s tweet seems to stem from his frustration over the fallout from his firing of FBI Director James Comey earlier this week. Trump told NBC on Thursday that he was looking for an excuse to fire Comey, who was leading an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

Comey could testify during an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, meaning the president’s tweet could be seen as witness intimidation.

The White House has been inconsistent in its explanation of Comey’s firing, pointing on Tuesday to a memo written by deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that suggested Comey’s handling of the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails had prompted his departure.

On Wednesday, Trump said Comey was let go because he “wasn’t doing a good job.” Later that day, deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders pointed to “atrocities” she says Comey committed in the Clinton email investigation.

But Comey’s firing came days after he reportedly asked for more resources to advance the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the U.S. presidential election. Trump questioned that investigation again Friday morning, calling it a “witch hunt.”

During his Twitter rant Friday morning, Trump also suggested he may stop press briefings, threatened the “fake media” and excused his aides for not giving journalists accurate information.

[Huffington Post]

 

Unhappy with Comey Coverage Trump Threatens to Cancel Press Briefings

In a flood of angry tweets Friday morning, President Trump threatened to cancel press briefings as he continues to grapple with the fallout from his abrupt firing of his FBI director and the conflicting stories he and his aides have told about it.

“As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!” Trump said. “Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future “press briefings” and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???”

In a striking reversal one day earlier, Trump told NBC News that he planned to fire Comey even before meeting with top-ranking Justice Department officials and soliciting their recommendations on his performance.

“I was going to fire regardless of (their) recommendation,” Trump said in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, calling Comey a “showboat” and “grandstander” who led the agency into turmoil.

He also specifically brought up the ongoing Russia investigation. “In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself – I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story,” Trump told NBC. “It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.”

These reasons contradicted the White House’s assertions — and even the widely disseminated termination letter Trump sent Comey — that the dismissal was based on the recommendations of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who criticized Comey’s handling of the email investigation into Hillary Clinton last year.

Trump’s statements raised even more questions about his decision to fire the FBI director who was running an investigation into possible collusion between Trump campaign associates and Russians seeking to influence the 2016 presidential election.

That coverage of the Comey story prompted the Friday tweetstorm from the president, who also continued to loudly deny that he or his team had anything to do with Russia’s hacking Democrats during the 2016 election.

While Democrats continue to decry the timing of Comey’s firing was a way to short-circuit the ongoing counterintelligence probe, Trump tweeted that is is all politics: “Again, the story that there was collusion between the Russians & Trump campaign was fabricated by Dems as an excuse for losing the election.”

In yet another tweet, Trump called the investigation into his campaign associates’ ties to Russia a “witch hunt,” insisting that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said there was no collusion.

[USA Today]

 

 

 

Trump Was Proud Of Himself For Coming Up With A Phrase That He Definitely Did Not Come Up With

On Thursday, The Economist released a lightly edited transcript of the interview, where Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn were also present.

While talking about his tax reform plan, Trump used the phrase “priming the pump” and claimed that he came up with it “a couple of days ago.” Except that the phrase dates back to the early 19th century, according to, you know, the dictionary.

Trump asked the editors from The Economist if they had had heard of the expression “prime the pump” and whether they understood it.

The Economist editors repeatedly assured him they had heard of it and even told him that the phrase was “very Keynesian.”

Trump asked again, “Have you heard that expression used before? Because I haven’t heard it. I mean, I just… came up with it a couple of days ago and I thought it was good.”

But it turns out the only way Trump came up with this phrase a couple days ago is if he is a time traveler.

Merriam-Webster — which has been known to troll the president frequently — explained that “pump priming” has been used to refer to government investment expenditures since at least 1933.

[Buzzfeed]

Trump Says He Didn’t Know Michael Flynn in 2015, Which Is a Big Lie

Last night, President Trump spoke with Lester Holt in an interview for NBC News. It’s truly a jaw-dropping conversation for a number of reasons, but there’s one important lie that everyone seems to have missed. Trump said that he didn’t know Michael Flynn in 2015. This simply isn’t true.

Lester Holt: Did you know that [Flynn] had received payments from the Russian government, that he had received payments from the Turkish government?

 

Donald Trump: No, but Obama perhaps knew, because he had clearance from the Obama administration, and this is something they never want to report. He had clearance from the Obama administration—the highest clearance you can have. And I think it’s a very unfair thing that the media doesn’t talk about that. You know, you’re talking about 2015. I don’t know that I knew him in 2015.

Putting aside for a minute the fact that Obama fired Flynn and that Obama even advised Trump not to hire him, it’s important to recognize that Trump is lying about not knowing Flynn in 2015.

In fact, Donald Trump first met with Michael Flynn in August of 2015, just two months after Trump announced he’d be running for president. But you don’t have to take my word for it. We know Trump met with Flynn in August of 2015 because Flynn told us.

From the February 27, 2017 issue of the New Yorker:

In August, 2015, Flynn went to New York to meet Trump for the first time. They were scheduled to talk for thirty minutes; the conversation lasted ninety. Flynn was deeply impressed. “I knew he was going to be the President of the United States,” he told me.

So let’s get this timeline straight.

  • August 2014: Flynn is ousted by Obama at the Defense Intelligence Agency.
  • June 2015: Trump announces his plan to run for president.
  • August 2015: Trump meets with Flynn for an hour and a half at Trump Tower.
  • December 2015: Flynn is paid by the Russian government to speak at a gala in Moscow and is seated at the same table as Vladimir Putin.
  • February 2016: Flynn starts acting as an informal policy advisor to the Trump campaign.

Got all that? Trump said in the interview last night that he didn’t think he knew Flynn in 2015. But he definitely did. Not only that, but by early 2016, Trump was being advised by Flynn on foreign policy matters during the campaign.

You really have to watch the entire interview from last night. It’s so bizarre, not least because Trump explained that he was going to fire FBI Director James Comey regardless of any recommendation made by the Justice Department. That directly contradicts two days of claims by his communications team.

Not to mention the fact that Trump claims Comey asked for the two of them to have dinner, a meeting at which Trump asked if he was under investigation by the FBI. Trump says that Comey assured him that he was not. President Trump also claims that Comey told him over the phone on two other occasions that he wasn’t under investigation.

Needless to say, if Trump’s story is true, it’s all highly illegal and unethical for a sitting president to ask the head of the FBI if he’s under investigation. There’s no way to explain this one away.

If Trump survives the fallout from this week—between firing the man who was leading the investigation against him to the poor optics of meeting with Russian officials the very next day—it’s safe to say that he’s going to serve his full term as president.

It doesn’t get much worse than this for Trump. But he seems to be lying his way through it with little resistance from the only people who can do anything about it: Congressional Republicans.

[Gizmodo]

Reality

Trump claims the media is not reporting that perhaps Obama knew Flynn had received payments from Russia and Turkey. But they did. Just a few days prior Sally Yates sat in front on Congress and told America yes the Obama administration knew of this and they tried to warn the Trump people, who did not taken them seriously because she was a “political opponent.”

Media

Trump Wants ‘Goddamned Steam,’ Not Digital Catapults on Aircraft Carriers

Navy officials were “blindsided” on Thursday, a spokesman told me, by President Donald Trump’s suggestion that he has convinced the Navy to abandon a long-planned digital launching system in favor of steam on its newest aircraft carrier.

In a wide-ranging interview with Time magazine, Trump described his disgust with the catapult system known as Electro-Magnetic Aircraft Launch System, nicknamed EMALS, aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford. (Time has published only excerpts from the interview, not a full transcript.) The president described wanting to scrap EMALS, a key technological upgrade at the center of the multibillion-dollar carrier project, and return to steam.

I said, “You don’t use steam anymore for catapult?” “No sir.” I said, “Ah, how is it working?” “Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam’s going all over the place, there’s planes thrown in the air.”

It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said—and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said, “What system are you going to be—” “Sir, we’re staying with digital.” I said, “No you’re not. You going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.”

What is digital? To answer the president’s question without getting into too many 0s and 1s, “digital” means using a computer to make something happen. You know, the same sort of machine that connects us all to the cyber. Are you still with me, or should we get Einstein over here? (I mean, Einstein has done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.) EMALS isn’t just computer-based but uses a linear induction motor. That motor—which uses electric currents to activate a magnetic core—propels a carriage down a track to launch an aircraft, rather than using a steam piston drive to pull the aircraft.

Despite Trump’s technological leanings—he’s TV obsessed, he was a semi-early adopter of the web, and he has a preternatural sense for Twitter drama—his question about “digital” calls to mind his apparent cluelessness about cyber security.

It’s not that EMALS has been a smashing success. Cost and schedule overruns have given the Navy carrier project a reputation for being “one of the most spectacular acquisition debacles in recent memory,” as Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, put it in 2015. “And that is saying something.” The construction of three Ford-class aircraft carriers has swelled from $27 billion to $36 billion in the last 10 years.

But the problems with the Ford-class carrier program are more organizational than technological—a common theme among infrastructural megaprojects. McCain blamed “misalignment of accountability and responsibility in our defense acquisition system” and the vast bureaucracy of defense acquisition systems, which span multiple offices and program managers.

Trump seems to have seized on the project’s bad reputation without appreciating—or at least without clearly articulating—the complexities of moving from steam to digital.

The steam-powered catapult systems that are being replaced have been used to launch airplanes from U.S. carriers for some six decades now. Not only are steam systems harder to maintain than electrical ones; they have a lower upper-limit during combat—meaning electrical systems can launch more aircraft in a shorter amount of time. Electrical systems can also better handle smaller aircrafts and drones compared with steam. Steam systems also put more stress on airframes, and make them more prone to corrosion. Not only that, but carriers themselves are exceedingly vulnerable to attack—meaning outfitting them with the modern defense systems is a priority.

The goal for the upgraded system is to use carriers to create “an operational honeycomb of interconnected forces with reach, range and lethality against air, sea, space, and land-based targets,” as Robbin Laird and Ed Timperlake wrote for the website Breaking Defense in 2015.

Despite some high-profile failures in early testing, EMALS is now nearly complete and ready for sea trials. It represents one of three major initiatives in the Navy’s push to go upgrade its weapons systems for the digital era.

Trump’s insistence on steam is perhaps bewildering, but also consistent with some of his other views about technology. After all, the president has repeatedly talked about returning to America’s golden age of manufacturing—an idea that’s laughable, if regrettable, to anyone who has looked closely at the forces driving the global economy. Among them: the rise of automation, which promises to dramatically transform the way humans work across multiple industries, and which Trump has all but ignored.

Then again, for a man who is clearly concerned with hugeness, you’d think Trump might appreciate EMALS: In working order, the system can launch anything from the sleekest drone to the sturdiest F-35, and it blasts through the technological limits imposed by steam. Trump has demonstrated a fondness for super carriers, and has said he plans to increase the U.S. fleet from 10 to 12.

He hasn’t, however, indicated how he plans to pay for that. The cost of a single new, Ford-class carrier—about $11 billion without cost overruns—would eat up nearly 20 percent of Trump’s proposed defense budget increase, Reuters reported in March.

The Navy says it is scrambling to figure out how to address the president’s concerns. A spokesman said it will issue a statement on Thursday afternoon, and figure out talking points for Naval leaders should the question come up at public events.

In the meantime, Trump might do well to worry more about the signature infrastructure promise of his own campaign, than a near-complete military project he doesn’t seem to understand.

(h/t The Atlantic)

Donald Trump just trolled Rosie O’Donnell. Not Good.

As his White House continued to struggle to get its story straight regarding the firing of FBI Director James Comey and the unwanted photo-op of the president and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak on Wednesday, Donald Trump took time out to troll longtime nemesis Rosie O’Donnell.

On Thursday afternoon, Trump retweeted a two-word tweet the actress sent in December 2016 that read: “FIRE COMEY.” He added this comment: “We finally agree on something Rosie.”

Reminder: Donald Trump is the president of the United States, the head of the US military and, arguably, the single most powerful person in the world.

O’Donnell and Trump have a loooooong history — dating all the way back to 2006. Trump refused to de-crown (not sure that’s a word) Miss USA Tara Conner after reports of her past alcohol and drug use surfaced. O’Donnell, at the time a co-host of “The View,” blasted Trump the following day — calling him “a snake-oil salesman on Little House On The Prairie” among many other things.

But, only one of these two people are president of the United States. Only one of them is making decisions about sending missiles into a Syrian airfield or dropping the “mother of all bombs” on Afghanistan. Or making final calls on the number of troops in Afghanistan. Or developing tax policy and trade policy with far-reaching impacts on the US economy. Or representing the US on the world stage.

On Thursday, O’Donnell responded: “u don’t even realize the kind of trouble u r in – comeys people believe in him – for real – they have the proof – u r a sadistic man #USA”

Now, it’s easy to laugh at Trump’s decision to re-engage his long-simmering feud with O’Donnell. (It’s a good tweet and an expert troll, after all.)

But, it should also give everyone pause. This is the president of the United States we are talking about. (I know I have said that three times. But it bears repeating!) He — and his administration — are in the midst of a self-inflicted crisis over the reasons for his decision to fire Comey. That he made time to troll Rosie O’Donnell says something about where his priorities and focus lie. And what it says is nothing good.

[CNN]

Reality

Trump and Republicans would be correct to point out liberal hypocrisy over the firing of James Comey if today was November 9th. At that time we would have absolutely cheered the release of the FBI Director who helped hand Trump a White House victory.

But since November 9th we’ve learned, from James Comey, that he and the FBI are investigating Trump and his administration for collusion with Russia, and just a week prior was asking for more resources for his investigation.

So let’s cut that talking point to shreds right now.

President Trump Attacks ‘Lunatic,’ ‘No-Talent,’ ‘Dumbest Person’ in TV

President Donald Trump says he thinks CNN’s Chris Cuomo looks like a “chained lunatic” on television. CNN’s Don Lemon is “perhaps the dumbest person in broadcasting” and CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert is a “no-talent guy” who talks “filthy.”

Those were just some of the comments Trump offered over dinner Monday night when asked about the media he consumes as President of the United States. But he did little to hide his frustration, explaining that he had been surprised that the journalistic criticism had gotten worse after the campaign. He also said he had been working on tuning out news that is critical of him.

“I’ve been able to do something that I never thought I had the ability to do. I’ve been able not to watch or read things that aren’t pleasant,” he said, maintaining that he no longer watches CNN or MSNBC. “And it keeps you young.”

There was little doubt, however, that he remained acutely aware of what reporters and correspondents were saying about him. He has large flat-screen televisions set up in the Treaty Room in the White House residence and in his private dining room in the West Wing. He continues to have stacks of newspapers and magazines delivered to his office suite in the West Wing.

“Washington Post, New York Times, they’re really, really dishonest,” he said, before directly addressing the TIME reporters he had invited for dinner. “You people are quite dishonest in all fairness.” He said he used to watch MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough but no longer does. He also claimed to have helped CNN president Jeff Zucker, an old friend and business colleague, get his job at the network.

The one network he praised was Fox News, saying he watches their shows and is responsible for its ratings bump.

Spokespeople for MSNBC and CBS said the networks had no comment on the president’s criticism. A CNN spokesperson said, “His comments are beneath the dignity of the office of the President.” Trump’s claims about CNN’s Zucker have been repeatedly refuted by the executives involved.

Here’s an extended excerpt of his conversation with TIME:

For instance I don’t watch CNN. I don’t watch MSNBC. Scarborough used to treat me great. But because I don’t do interviews and stuff and want to … He went the other way. Which is fine. He’s got some problems. But I don’t watch the show anymore. It drives him crazy. I don’t watch the show.

I do watch Fox in the morning, and their ratings have gone through the roof because everyone knows I’m watching Fox. But they’re pleasant. And if I do something wrong they report on it. I don’t mean they – if I do something wrong. But it’s really, honestly it’s the most accurate.

CNN in the morning, Chris Cuomo, he’s sitting there like a chained lunatic. He’s like a boiler ready to explode, the level of hatred. And the entire, you know the entire CNN platform is that way. This Don Lemon who’s perhaps the dumbest person in broadcasting, Don Lemon at night it’s like – sometimes they’ll have a guest who by mistake will say something good. And they’ll start screaming, we’re going to commercial. They cut him off. Remember?

I’ve seen things where by mistake somebody they bring in a guest and it turns out to be a positive. And they go, I mean they get just killed. The level of hatred. And poor Jeffrey Lord. I love Jeffrey Lord. But sometimes he’s sitting there with eight unknown killers that nobody ever heard of. And CNN actually is not doing nearly as well as others. They’re all doing well because of me. But it’s not doing as well as others that are doing better actually. But Fox treats me very fairly. MSNBC is ridiculous. It’s just bad.

It’s an ability I never thought I’d have. I never thought I’d have the ability to say, they’re doing a big story on me on CNN and I won’t watch it. And it’s amazing, it doesn’t matter. But it really, the equilibrium is much better. As far as newspapers and things, I glance at them. They’re really dishonest. I mean they’re really dishonest.

Trump also brought up The Late Show host Stephen Colbert’s blistering and crude May 1 monologue, in which the comedian delivered an oral-sex joke about the president and Russian President Vladimir Putin:

You see a no-talent guy like Colbert. There’s nothing funny about what he says. And what he says is filthy. And you have kids watching. And it only builds up my base. It only helps me, people like him. The guy was dying. By the way they were going to take him off television, then he started attacking me and he started doing better. But his show was dying. I’ve done his show. … But when I did his show, which by the way was very highly rated. It was high—highest rating. The highest rating he’s ever had.

(h/t Time)

Donald Trump Thinks Health Insurance Costs $15 a Month

Donald Trump, the President of these United States of America, either believes that health insurance currently costs $15 a month or he believes that’s how much it should cost. This is according to an interview he did with The Economist on May 4, the same day the American Health Care Act passed the House. A transcript of the interview was published yesterday.

The interview was about economic policy, but they also discussed healthcare and the AHCA. One of the Economist editors pointed out that “some people will look at this bill and say, ‘hang on, a lot of people are going to lose their coverage.'” In Trump’s response, he said [emphasis added]:

You’re going to have absolute guaranteed coverage. You’re going to have it if you’re a person going in…don’t forget, this was not supposed to be the way insurance works. Insurance is, you’re 20 years old, you just graduated from college, and you start paying $15 a month for the rest of your life and by the time you’re 70, and you really need it, you’re still paying the same amount and that’s really insurance.

But I believe it’s very important to have this. Because one thing Obamacare did, is it gave that and it was a concept that people hadn’t heard of. And now I don’t want to end it. I don’t want to end it for somebody that…first of all I don’t want to end it for the people that already have it. And I don’t want to end it for somebody that hasn’t been buying insurance for all of his life where he has a guarantee that for all of his life he’s been buying the insurance and he can buy it inexpensively when he turns 65 or 70 years old. So we put in a tremendous amount and we’re…you know, for the pre-existing conditions. We are going to have a great pool for pre-existing conditions.

Before we even talk about the $15 figure, it bears repeating that the AHCA guarantees coverage for pre-existing conditions in name only, not in practice: The version that passed the House said people couldn’t be denied coverage but that states could choose to let insurers charge people more if they have pre-existing conditions. It would also let insurers charge older people up to five times more than younger people (the current limit is three times more). Trump and other Republicans swear up and down that additional money for high-risk pools will prevent people from being priced out, but multiple think tanks say it’s not nearly enough money.

Now, back to premiums. Trying to decipher exactly what Trump means is often a fool’s errand, but this response seems to have several possible interpretations. Is Trump confusing health insurance with life insurance, which could cost a healthy, 20-something person about $15 a month, according to Mother Jones? Possibly.

Or maybe he thinks people pay $15 a month for health insurance right now, but that is demonstrably false. The average monthly premium for people buying their own insurance was $235.27 in 2013, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and many people’s premiums have increased since then. But if it is $15 then why would premiums need to be lower, a point he’s been hammering since the start of his campaign? He even parroted that line later in his response to the question about people losing coverage, saying: “We’re going to have much lower premiums and we’re going to have much lower deductibles.”

Yet another possibility is that this is how much he thinks health insurance premiums should cost, as Sarah Kliff argues at Vox. Fifteen-dollar-premiums would certainly be much lower than what people are paying now, but it’s totally unrealistic and suggests he has no idea what he’s talking about. Unless, of course, he wants to bring something like Australia’s universal healthcare system to the US. After all, he told the Australian prime minister that it’s better than what we have.

[VICE]

Trump’s Meeting With Russian Officials Was Closed To Media — Except Russian Media

President Donald Trump’s meeting Wednesday morning with two top Russian officials was closed to all press — except, apparently, official government photographers.

Trump met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, along with Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak.

“The Lavrov meeting was closed to the press and the only visual account we have of it thus far is via handout photos from the Russian government,” The Hill’s Jordan Fabian wrote in a pool report Wednesday morning. “Those images show Trump also met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.”

Gizmodo’s Matt Novak noted on Twitter that Getty wire images of the meeting were credited to TASS, which is commonly described as state-run or state-owned.

Fabian later reported that an unnamed White House official told him: “On background, our official photographer and their official photographer were present, that’s it.”

The Associated Press noted that photos it distributed from the meeting were government hand-outs and credited the Russian Foreign Ministry, though it did not list the photographer Alexander Shcherbak, as Getty did.

White House spokespeople did not immediately respond to TPM’s questions about the press arrangement Wednesday. TASS’ Washington bureau chief, Andrei Sitov, told TPM that no one from his bureau was present at the meeting.

“Apparently the TASS person was admitted at the request of the Russian Foreign Ministry as the official photographer for the Russian side,” Sitov added in a later email. “He is permanently assigned to cover FM Lavrov. His pictures from the meeting are available at the Russian FM’s Flickr. I was not even aware of this.” The Foreign Ministry’s Flickr page can be found here.

The White House published it’s own official readout of the meeting:

President Donald J. Trump met today with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia, following on the visit of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to Moscow last month. President Trump emphasized the need to work together to end the conflict in Syria, in particular, underscoring the need for Russia to rein in the Assad regime, Iran, and Iranian proxies. The President raised Ukraine, and expressed his Administration’s commitment to remain engaged in resolving the conflict and stressed Russia’s responsibility to fully implement the Minsk agreements. He also raised the possibility of broader cooperation on resolving conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere. The President further emphasized his desire to build a better relationship between the United States and Russia.

(h/t Talking Points Memo)

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