The Trump White House released the official transcript of a press appearance featuring Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin without a question in which Putin is asked if wanted Trump to win—and provides a response in which he admits not only that he favored Trump, but took action to make it happen.
This is the question from Reuters reporter Jeff Mason and Putin’s translated response.
Reuters: President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election, and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?
Putin: Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the US—Russia relationship back to normal.
But only the second half the question appears in the transcript of the event provided by the White House, which obscures Putin’s clear preference for Trump and makes the answer impossible to understand.
The Atlantic pointed out the discrepancy a week ago, and Rachael Maddow has the video of the question being asked and answered. However, not only does the official White House transcript not include half the question, the White House “live stream” of the event chops off partway through the question. A comparison between the White House version and other transcripts does find a match, as the Kremlin also dropped this segment from their coverage of the event. However, some press versions, including Bloomberg and the Washington Post, are also missing part of the question.
If missing the question was a mistake made at the time … then why hasn’t it been corrected? The full transcript has been made available through a number of sources, including NPR and Vox. But the White House transcript still omits the question about Putin wanting Trump to win. The failure to correct this issue is directly pertinent to Russian involvement in the 2016 election, and to the fact that Russia was not randomly “meddling,” but putting in a concerted effort to sway the election to Trump by any means available. But the bigger reason for excluding the segment from the transcript may be that it goes against the new White House narrative—the one that claims Russia will “be pushing very hard for the Democrats” because “They definitely don’t want Trump!”
But Putin does want Trump. He did want Trump. Russia did everything it could to help Trump, and Vladimir Putin admitted it in a news conference covered around the world. Only those facts didn’t agree with the narrative.
"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past," repeated Winston obediently.
— George Orwell, 1984
The original story from The Atlantic published shortly after the conference covers the import of the answer. When Putin says “Yes I did,” he is clearly agreeing that he wanted Trump to win. But is he also making a public statement that he told his officials to make that happen?
Reuters reporter Mason, who asked the questions, thinks it’s unlikely that Putin decided to make an open confession of his involvement, especially when both Trump and Putin spent much of the press event claiming that there was “no collusion.”
But since the Q & A not only bluntly underlined the obvious lie behind the “Russia likes Dems” story, and could be read as Putin cheerfully admitting to putting his thumb on the scale, the White House appears to have done the easiest thing—they simply edited the context of Putin’s response. And, by an astounding coincidence, the Kremlin took the same action.
The Washington Post, whose own transcript partially omits the Reuters question, has produced an article that absolves both the White House and their own coverage. The claim is that both the White House and the Post worked from bad audio in putting together the coverage. They support this claim by offering two different recordings of the press event, one where Mason’s question is clear, and one where it is partially obscured by the voice of a translator.
But multiple sources did have the transcript correct on day one, and the Atlantic article correctly pointed out the error in the White House transcript from the beginning. In fact, everything that the Post is now claiming as the reason for their version of the transcript, and the White House erasing of the original Mason question about Putin’s support for Trump, was covered, in detail, in that Atlantic piece from Uri Friedman, who went through it point by point. He also notes that transcripts from NPR of the event included the full question, as did those from Vox and other sources.
The discrepancies in the accounts of what was said also underscore the extent to which the Trump presidency has challenged a common understanding of reality. Even if the omission was accidental, it appears suspicious at a moment marked by the president’s repeated claims that legitimate news reports are “fake.”
1984 is not meant to be an instruction manual.