Trump-Putin summit –
Confidential documents forgotten in a printer in Alaska
Eight pages marked with the seal of the American State Department, discovered in an anchorage hotel, uncovered unpublished and potentially sensitive information.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin Friday in Anchorage in Alaska.
Keystone
It is a mistake as trivial as they are worrying: eight pages marked with the seal of the US State Department were found on Friday morning in the free access printer of an anchorage hotel, revealed the American public radio This weekend. They contain sensitive details of Summit held the day before Between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at the Elmendorf-Richardson military base.
These documents, presumably written by members of the American administration and inadvertently left in the business center of the Captain Cook hotel, detailed the precise schedules, the places of the meetings as well as the telephone numbers of several US officials.
The Minimized White House
We rewind. Around 9 am Friday, three customers of the establishment, located about twenty minutes from the military base of Elmendorf-Richardson where the bilateral meeting was held, found the forgotten pages in a public printer. One of them transmitted photos of the document to NPR, under the cover of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
DR
Faced with these revelations, the White House minimized the case. On Saturday, the deputy spokesperson Anna Kelly qualified the document as a simple “lunch menu” and assured that there had been no security flaws. The State Department did not react to the requests of journalists.
The first page specified the order of the planned meetings, with the exact names of the rooms of the military base. She also indicated that President Trump intended to offer his Russian counterpart a office statue representing a white -headed eagle, American national symbol.
Table plan and dinner menu
The following pages contained a list of thirteen senior American and Russian officials, with telephone contact details of three American staff. To facilitate exchanges, the document also proposed a phonetic transcription of the Russian names, including an indication of the pronunciation of names, including that of Putin.
Other pages detailed the planned lunch “in honor of His Excellency Vladimir Putin”. A table plan indicated that Trump and Putin had to sit face to face. The American president was to be surrounded by six officials, including the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the chief of staff, Susie Wiles.
On the Russian side, Putin was to be accompanied in particular by her Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, and his advisor, Yuri Ushakov.
The planned menu – finally canceled – consisted of a green salad, a choice between the cute net and the “Olympia” stagnation and a crème brûlée in dessert.
Other hiccups
For Jon Michaels, professor of law at UCLA and specialist in national security quoted by NPR, this discovery illustrates a serious negligence: “It is additional proof of the casualness and the incompetence of the administration. We don’t leave documents in a printer, it’s as simple as that. ”
This affair is added to a recent succession of security clums. Earlier in the week, a discussion group on messaging of immigration officials had accidentally integrated an unknown during exchanges on the hunt for a criminal. In March, national security officials were mistakenly added a journalist to a conversation on the signal application concerning imminent military strikes in Yemen.
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