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Trump Official: We ‘Let the Biggest Perpetrator of Fake News into the Oval Office’
Team Trump is “either in bed with the Russians or too stupid to understand the severity of this mistake,” an official fumed after Kremlin press got exclusive Oval Office access.
ASAWIN SUEBSAENG
LACHLAN MARKAY
05.11.17 4:19 PM ET
Senior members of the Trump administration are livid that the White House allowed the Russian government to steer the narrative of the president’s Wednesday meeting with top Russian diplomats by giving Kremlin-backed media exclusive access to the event.
The White House did not allow American press into the meeting between President Donald Trump, Russian foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak. But it did admit a photographer from TASS, a state-owned Russian news service. Its photos were subsequently posted on TASS’s website, giving that outlet a monopoly on publishable visuals of the meeting.
Russian government Twitter accounts shared photos of the event shortly after its conclusion. They revealed Kislyak’s presence—a fact that was not even mentioned in the official White House readout of the meeting. Some U.S. officials suspect Kislyak, whose conversations with Trump’s former National Security Adviser have fed an FBI investigation of his campaign, is a Kremlin spy—or at least spy-adjacent.
Two senior administration officials, one an Obama holdover and the other a Trump appointee, told The Daily Beast that the resulting reliance of U.S. media on a propaganda arm of a foreign government let Russia set the public tone of the meeting and embarrassed the administration amid already contentious discussions with Russian diplomats.
Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity in order to candidly express their views. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“This isn’t an ‘America First’ policy,” one of the officials fumed of the White House’s decision “to let the biggest perpetrator of fake news into the Oval Office.”
Trump, the official added, is “either in bed with the Russians or too stupid to understand the severity of this mistake. Either way, the implications are truly terrifying.”
The hurt feelings inside the White House weren’t much sunnier.
“Yes, I admit the optics are bad—that was not intentional or anything,” one senior White House official told The Daily Beast. “I literally face-palmed with this one.”
The official noted that White House senior staff and press office were “sour” about the way this played out because top White House staff "somehow" did not foresee that the photos of Trump's chummy, American-press-free meeting with Kislyak and Lavrov would be almost immediately published by TASS.
Administration officials also claimed on Thursday that they had been misled into believing that TASS was documenting the event internally, just as an official White House photographer on hand for the meeting was. “We were not informed by the Russians that their official photographer was dual-hatted and would be releasing the photographs on the state news agency,” an administration official told The Washington Post.
Furthermore, National Security Agency director Mike Rogers said Thursday that the NSA was not consulted ahead of time regarding the Russian-government visit to the Oval Office that produced what amounted to glam shots for Russian state-news and official social-media channels.
more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/11/trump-official-we-let-the-biggest-perpetrator-of-fake-news-into-the-oval-office?via=newsletter&source=DDAfternoon
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