Don’t buy into Trump’s spin. No legit news agencies reported that it was “secret.” Trump lied about that to bolster his fakenews dismissal of a serious event.
The story is that the president of the United States had a somewhat lengthy sidebar conversation with the president of Russia. With no other U.S. officials present. And that we didn’t know about it until Ian Bremmer reported on it Monday night. The Whitehouse had zero intention of ever mentioning it, much less doing a read-out as is standard protocol.
We don’t know what they talked about and we probably never will know the full story. But Trump has inadvertently admitted it was about sanctions (“adoptions” is code for sanctions because Putin retaliated against the Magnitsky Act sanctions by blocking american adoptions of russian orphans).
Sanctions relief seems to be one of Putin’s two goals behind Russia’s support for the trump campaign. (The other seems to be Putin’s grudge against Clinton for the protests during the 2012 russian election). FYI, the Magnistky sanctions are specifically targeted at individuals involved with human rights abuses, they don’t affect the Russian public at large. Many billionaire oligarchs are affected.
