Russian To Judgment, Con't

On Friday the White House remarked that Donald Trump would not be meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam because of "scheduling conflicts". Then all reporters were kicked out except for FOX News US state media.

Nearly all U.S. journalists covering U.S. President Donald Trump’s appearance at a major economic summit in Vietnam were barred from attending key events Friday and Saturday, including photo-ops featuring interactions between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The small group of U.S.-based reporters who track Trump’s movements abroad, known as the travel pool, was largely relegated to a holding room on Saturday while nearly two dozen world leaders posed for photographs and mingled at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Danang.

A Fox News video crew and an official White House photographer were granted access to the meetings. Fox was the news organization that was tasked with providing pool video to other news outlets. But the rest of the pool reporters, including independent photographers from U.S. news organizations, were blocked from covering the event.

A similar situation unfolded Friday night, when planned coverage of an APEC dinner with Trump and other leaders was scrapped, leaving print reporters, photographers and other members of the pool without the ability to cover the event.

New York Times Photographer Doug Mills, who is traveling with the president as part of the pool, tweeted his frustration at the lack of access, with an image of a black square attached. “This what our APEC Summit photo coverage looks today (sic) in Da Nang Vietnam. Blank. No coverage by the White House Travel Pool photographers traveling with @realDonaldTrump.”

The White House said it asked for more access for pool reporters, but was denied.

“We have been negotiating since the pre-advance and have made progress on almost every event for this swing,” Michelle Meadows, a White House official helping to organize the trip, told reporters in an email Friday when asked why they were not given access to the event. “We ALWAYS ask for the full Pool to have access but we do not always get what we want.”

Which naturally meant Trump met with Putin and didn't want the world to know.  Afterwards we got some very strong and very curious statements from both men.  First, US and Russia joint military cooperation in Syria will continue pretty much forever.

President Vladimir Putin and U.S. leader Donald Trump agreed to support a political reconciliation in Syria with the participation of Bashar el-Assad while maintaining the existing two-nation communication channels used to fight Islamic State.

The leaders are satisfied with the “successful U.S.-Russia” military efforts that have “dramatically accelerated” the group’s battlefield losses, according to a joint statement issued after the leaders met briefly on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam.

“These efforts will continue until the final defeat of Islamic State,” according to the statement. A U.S. official who requested anonymity said the joint statement shows both leaders back a political solution and peace process.

We're currently giving Moscow an effectively permanent military foothold in the Middle East and helping them do it, giving Putin military ground access to Iraq, Turkey, Jordan, Israel and of course Lebanon, the current Saudi-Iran flashpoint.  Oh, and Moscow's money laundering capital of Cyprus is just 150 miles off the coast of Syria.  Vlad couldn't ask for a better base of operations.

He's got us cold, so he's feeling pretty confident, enough to publicly accuse the Democrats of making up the entire Mueller investigation.

An alleged link between U.S. President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and Russia is being fabricated by Trump’s opponents as a weapon against Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday.

Reports that Putin’s relatives were involved in contacts with Trump administration were untrue, Putin told a briefing at the end of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam. 

And here's the kicker - Trump not only copped to meeting with Putin, Trump of course believes him 100%.

While agreeing to renew peace efforts in Syria, President Trump said Saturday that Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin denied interfering in the 2016 election.

President Trump confirmed the agreement, telling reporters that he and Putin had "two or three very short conversations," in which they largely discussed Syria — though he said Putin also denied Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

“He said he didn't meddle,” Trump said. “He said he didn't meddle. I asked him again. You can only ask so many times. I just asked him again. He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did." 

In fact on the way home from Vietnam Trump attacked his own intelligence agencies. Again.

President Trump on Saturday lashed out at U.S. intelligence leaders for their conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, calling them “political hacks” and slamming the investigations into Russian interference as a “Democratic hit job.”

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump blasted former U.S. intelligence officials by name, including former CIA director John Brennan, former director of national intelligence James Clapper and former FBI Director James Comey."I mean, give me a break, they are political hacks," Trump said, according to CNN. 

"So you look at it, I mean, you have Brennan, you have Clapper and you have Comey. Comey is proven now to be a liar and he is proven now to be a leaker.”

“So you look at that and you have President Putin very strongly, vehemently says he had nothing to do with them," he continued, referring to the Russian president.

Trump said that the investigation into Russian interference in the election was a “Democratic-inspired thing” and a “pure hit job."

If there's somehow any doubt that Moscow has metric craptons of compromising information on Trump, well understand that Putin is now in charge of our Syria policy and the Justice Department for starters.

Meanwhile here stateside, as many people suspected, the "senior policy adviser" in Robert Mueller's announcement of George Papadapoulos's guilty plea is Trump's Nazi buddy Stephen Miller.

At midday on March 24, 2016, an improbable group gathered in a London cafe to discuss setting up a meeting between Donald J. Trump, then a candidate, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

There was George Papadopoulos, a 28-year-old from Chicago with an inflated résumé who just days earlier had been publicly named as a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign. There was Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic in his mid-50s with a faltering career who boasted of having high-level contacts in the Russian government.

And, perhaps most mysteriously, there was Olga Polonskaya, a 30-year-old Russian from St. Petersburg and the former manager of a wine distribution company. Mr. Mifsud introduced her to Mr. Papadopoulos as Mr. Putin’s niece, according to court papers. Mr. Putin has no niece.

The interactions between the three players and a fourth man with contacts inside Russia’s Foreign Ministry have become a central part of the inquiry by the special prosecutor, Robert S. Mueller III, into the Kremlin’s efforts to interfere with the presidential election. Recently released court documents suggest that the F.B.I. suspected that some of the people who showed interest in Mr. Papadopoulos were participants in a Russian intelligence operation.

The March 2016 meeting was followed by a breakfast the next month at a London hotel during which Mr. Mifsud revealed to Mr. Papadopoulos that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” That was months before the theft of a trove of emails from the Democratic National Committee by Russian-sponsored hackers became public.

Mr. Mueller’s investigators are seeking to determine who — if anyone — in the Trump campaign Mr. Papadopoulos told about the stolen emails. Although there is no evidence that Mr. Papadopoulos emailed that information to the campaign, Mr. Papadopoulos was in regular contact that spring with top campaign officials, including Stephen Miller, now a senior adviser to President Trump, according to interviews and campaign documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The revelations about Mr. Papadopoulos’s activities are part of a series of disclosures in the past two weeks about communications between Trump campaign advisers and Russian officials or self-described intermediaries for the Russian government. Taken together, they show not only that the contacts were more extensive than previously known, but also that senior campaign officials were aware of them.

Miller is still in the White House.  I don't think that will be the case much longer.

Have a nice day.