The former US president did not share with the public what was said in his talks with his Russian counterpart, but his successor now has access to these documents, and secrets cannot be ruled out in the near future.
The handover of power between the government of the forty-fifth president of the United States and the next government wasn’t easy, given this Donald Trump To the end, he refused to admit his defeat in the elections. Although not all employees of all government ministries and agencies will be replaced for the time being, the leadership change will still impose a huge task on those managing the transition.
Of course, this also includes issues of national security and foreign policy, which have been central to Trump’s work. Suffice it to say that the first impeachment case was launched against him because he wanted to persuade the President of Ukraine to help find something burdensome for his political opponent, Joe Biden And against his son. Or there is a strange relationship with Trump Kim Jong Un With the North Korean dictator running Recep Tayyip Erdogan With the Turkish President. But what really interests everyone is what Donald Trump was talking about between 2017 and 2021 Russian President Vladimir Putin With the Russian president.
Soviet-style propaganda
The secrecy of Trump and Putin’s talks is well illustrated by the fact that even his national security adviser, John Bolton Only Trump, or one of the president’s interpreters, has been informed of their contents. Bolton after leaving the White House in 2020 Summarize it in a book His time in the Trump government, and he was very tough about the (foreign) political performance of his former boss.
Trump sought the company of authoritarian leaders, so try to build a good relationship with Putin as well. The Mueller investigation overshadowed the relationship between the two presidents, which was designed to see if the Russians were really trying to influence the 2016 presidential election. The investigation found sufficient evidence of this, but the Kremlin still denies it has anything to do with it. The former National Security Adviser himself negotiated with Putin, and he knew how polished he was, so I thought it wasn’t a good idea to leave Trump alone with him.
He never spoke about Trump’s opinion of Putin, at least in front of me. I never asked him what he thought of it, maybe because I was afraid of what he would answer. His personal opinion of the Russian leader remained a mystery
Bolton Books. But the former adviser also tells us that Trump once claimed that Putin should be called in because the Russian president really wanted to talk to him. Meanwhile, the exact opposite was true: The US president wanted to negotiate with Putin anyway.
On another occasion, Bolton was present during the phone call and described Putin’s behavior as “a wonderful display of Soviet-style propaganda.” The topic of the conversation was, among other things, the situation in Venezuela at that time, where Nicolas Maduro Face the president th Juan Guaidó Led by the opposition, and there were continuous demonstrations in the Latin American country, the chaos was continuing. The US had previously defended Guaidó and considered him the true leader of Venezuela, but Putin said there was no real support behind the opposition politician and described himself as president as much as he did in 2016. Hillary Clinton. Putin knew exactly what he was going to say to Trump, who was bleeding from Clinton. Moreover, the Russian president also claimed – in Bolton’s completely deviated formulation – that the United States consolidated Maduro in his power by siding with Guaidó.
That is why the former adviser was concerned about the incident at the 2018 G20 meeting in Buenos Aires. The United States and Russia have set a date for a bilateral meeting that will not be missed, but Putin and Trump are seated side by side at a dinner for heads of state. They started the conversation, but using Putin’s translator and none of Trump’s employees were close enough to hear what this was about.
Like two friends in a bar
It is a priority for national security to know what Trump said to Putin,
He said A political expert, Joe Biden and his staff can now see materials the former president tried to hide. Not at all: Trump concealed some of the talks using the most secretive National Security Council (NSC) code system, which restricts access not only to key advisors but even members of the government.
The article mentions that talks between Trump and Putin were often announced early by the Kremlin before the White House, or that the US president wrote something about it on Twitter. Trump tried to prevent anything from leaking from these conversations to the point that he did not repeatedly ask for a translator, but was only present from the Russian side, There was no audio recording of the phone conversations, but it just so happened that counselors also listened to the conversation and took notes – these are non-verbatim texts called memcon (short for conversation notes).
Memcon documents are part of the Presidential Archives and were therefore transferred, as usual, to the National Archives at the end of Trump’s term. Although former members of the National Security Council have actively participated in handing over the documents, not everyone is pleased that the new government has access to the memos. A former member of the presidential cabinet believes there are talks that should remain hidden from Biden so that he does not use them for partisan political purposes. However, that’s not how it works.
The only person with leadership privileges is the incumbent president. So it is unthinkable in a situation where a former president might prevent his successor from seeing something
A national security attorney told Politico. In the weeks leading up to Biden’s inauguration on January 20, independent NSC members handed over a wealth of documents to the new hires, including intelligence reports, strategy papers, and ongoing operations. They also talked about what Trump had agreed with his allies and rivals, including Russia.
However, the truth is that hidden comments will give a much better picture of the dynamics of the conversations. Of course, it is up to the Biden administration to decide how much will be announced, but in any case, the American translator who has been involved in Trump and Putin talks on several occasions often felt as if he was listening to two friends talking in a bar.
