Aren't leakers supposed to be the sent to the dungeon? All this was sent in January, so the purposes of the sudden release are yet to be known. Surely, to claim Mueller's team leaked, and to set talking points for Magats. In other speculation, because Trumps other than Melania and Barron left for a trip to Camp David, is the gathering to coordinate stories?Sure, this is within the normal run of criminal behavior...... Then there's the more ground-breaking stuff... From "
Emptywheel's Putin Theory":
Right in the middle of this heated effort to respond to the NYT, Trump bizarrely spent an hour chatting Vladimir Putin up over dinner at the G-20.... The question here is not just "why did you release such a partial statement that the documentary record proves is inaccurate?" Nor is it, "why did you emphasize adoptions — Russian code for sanctions — rather than the sanctions that were at the core of the meeting?"
It's also the unstated question: "Did you dictate that statement? Or did Vladimir Putin?"
Here's the nutty bit. We don't actually have to speculate about whether that spin — adoptions rather than sanctions — came up in the chat between Putin and Trump. In an interview not long after news of the June 9 meeting broke, Trump actually told the NYT he and Putin were talking about adoptions.
TRUMP: We talked about Russian adoption. Yeah. I always found that interesting. Because, you know, he ended that years ago. And I actually talked about Russian adoption with him, which is interesting because it was a part of the conversation that Don [Jr., Mr. Trump’s son] had in that meeting. As I’ve said — most other people, you know, when they call up and say, "By the way, we have information on your opponent," I think most politicians — I was just with a lot of people, they said [inaudible], "Who wouldn't have taken a meeting like that?" They just said——
HABERMAN: The senators downstairs?
TRUMP: A lot of them. They said, "Who wouldn't have taken a meeting like that?"
By his own admission, Trump went from the July 7 dinner chat about adoptions with Putin and "dictated" a statement that just happened to focus, misleadingly, on adoptions.
So, yeah, the big question in this entire list is the unstated one: did you dictate that statement? Or did Putin?
