Putin helping his puppet: Russians "leak" a document on Helsinki private meeting to Politico

[highplainsdem]

As if this alleged info on what was really discussed would be leaked to any Western media without Putin's express approval.

And what was leaked was designed to make that secret meeting appear less worrisome, more normal -- and it apparently succeeded, judging by the last paragraph in this excerpt from the Politico story tonight:

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/07/putin-trump-arms-control-russia-724718

Vladimir Putin presented President Donald Trump with a series of requests during their private meeting in Helsinki last month, including new talks on controlling nuclear arms and prohibiting weapons in space, according to a Russian document obtained by POLITICO.

A page of proposed topics for negotiation, not previously made public, offers new insights into the substance of the July 16 dialogue that even Trump's top advisers have said they were not privy to at the time. Putin shared the contents of the document with Trump during their two-hour conversation, according to a U.S. government adviser who provided an English-language translation.

POLITICO also reviewed a Russian-language version of the document, which bore the header in Cyrillic “Dialogue on the Issue of Arms Control." The person who provided the document to POLITICO obtained it from Russian officials who described it as what Putin had conveyed to Trump in Helsinki.

The White House declined to comment on the document Tuesday, aside from denying that Trump had received any actual paperwork.

The memo points to a surprising normalcy in the priorities that Putin brought to the meeting, which included a willingness to extend a series of landmark nuclear treaties and pursue new weapons limits. Such issues have been standard fare in Russian-U.S. dialogue for decades — though they’ve been overshadowed of late by rising tensions over topics like Syria and Ukraine, as well as bipartisan complaints in Washington about Trump’s refusal to challenge Putin's denials that Moscow had interfered in the 2016 election.

-snip-

[unblock]

1. yeah i believe all that.

as if they're going to tell us they talked about lifting sanctions, breaking up nato, absorbing the baltic states, business deals for donnie in russia, how to commit more electoral espionage for the midterms, etc.

yeah, they met completely in private because they were talking about mundane, boring, usual stuff.

[nature-lover]

2. Putin likes to control the message.

[highplainsdem]

3. True. But Politico shouldn't be helping him by being so gullible.

[nature-lover]

4. Yes. Reporting "just the facts" would be appreciated.

I like to read or hear commentary, but it should be labeled as such.

[heaven05]

5. Bullshit

and Russian-Amerikan subterfuge.