Trump says he won’t have another disastrous press conference because Poppy Bush died… as protocol takes it in the neck again during the Trump regime. Trump canceled a formal G-20 meeting with Vlad but still had time for informal meeting(s). The WH remains clueless about “reasons” for doing things, as if the cancellation of a formal meeting was about the Ukraine/Russia crisis.
President Trump had an “informal” conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires on Friday night, the White House announced.
“As is typical at multilateral events, President Trump and the First Lady had a number of informal conversations with world leaders at the dinner last night, including President Putin,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement Saturday.
It is unclear exactly what topics the leaders discussed.
thehill.com/...
Michael Cohen’s plea deal for making false statements to Congress doesn’t just indicate that he lied about the Trump Organization’s attempt to get a real estate project off the ground in Russia — it also indicates that the Kremlin helped in the cover-up.
In sum, Cohen emailed Peskov about a development project and got a response that led to a string of phone calls. But as Trump’s contacts with Russia came under increased scrutiny in the summer of 2017, both Cohen and the Kremlin decided to lie about it, pretending they’d never successfully connected.
While Cohen’s plea agreement indicates that the Kremlin helped Trump cover up his contacts with Russia, it remains unclear why they did so.
[...]
In the day since news of Cohen’s deal broke, Trump abruptly moved the goalposts about his Russia contacts — his new position being that contacts did happen but there was nothing criminal about them.
www.vox.com/...