The White House Quietly Corrects Its Putin Transcript
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The White House Quietly Corrects Its Putin Transcript
After more than a week of questions, the presidential record reflects that Putin admitted to wanting Trump to win.
Uri Friedman
Jul 26, 2018
Nine days after The Atlantic first reported that part of a key exchange between a reporter and Vladimir Putin was missing from the official White House transcript of the Russian leader’s press conference with Donald Trump, the White House has corrected the error. It made the fix after facing repeated questions from reporters about the discrepancy over the past week and, most recently, allegations that the Trump administration had intentionally altered the text. The White House now denies this, blaming the problem on a technical glitch.
The Reuters reporter Jeff Mason’s first question, “President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election?”, which didn’t show up in the original transcript, now appears alongside his second question: “And did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?”
The full quote is critical to understanding the meaning of what Putin says next: “Yes, I wanted him to win, because he talked about the normalization of Russian–American relations.” (According to the English translation broadcast during the press conference, which is also used in the White House transcript, Putin responded, “Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.–Russia relationship back to normal.” But Russian speakers told me this is an inaccurate translation, and the Russian president was clearly saying “yes” to preferring Trump over Hillary Clinton—not to directing his government to assist Trump in defeating Clinton.)
Putin, in other words, was publicly admitting for the first time that he favored the Republican candidate because of Trump’s conciliatory approach to Russia, and therefore acknowledging a motive for meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election even as he contested claims that he had done so. The admission became even more significant this week, when Trump, who has long rejected the notion that Putin preferred him over Clinton, expressed concerns about Russia seeking to help Democrats in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. “No President has been tougher on Russia than me,” he wrote on Twitter. The Russians “definitely don’t want Trump!” Putin’s statement only days earlier seemed to directly contradict that argument. He had declared, essentially: I wanted Trump.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/white-house-transcript-correction/566183/
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