Russian To Judgment, Con't

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Munich on Friday, and if the Russians hadn't said anything, we never would have known it happened.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on Friday in an encounter the American side apparently wanted to keep under wraps.

The State Department made no announcement of the meeting, which took place in Lavrov's own dedicated meeting room at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, where the major annual conference of politicians, policymakers and security experts is held. Pompeo's aides also did not provide any readout after the meeting ended.

Russian journalists traveling with Lavrov were aware of the meeting in advance, and wrote about it afterward.
Lavrov's spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, confirmed the meeting in a Facebook post, which included a photo of Pompeo in a hallway of the hotel, and Lavrov standing in a doorway a few steps behind him.

In the post, Zakharova wrote that Pompeo had said "good luck" to those gathered in the hallway, and cheekily added that those who heard it "gasped."

"There are few to whom Americans now wish something good," she wrote.
Asked about the meeting by POLITICO, a State Department official confirmed that there had been a “pull aside” with Lavrov but gave no further details. The official denied that the State Department asked Russia not to publicize the meeting and said it did not normally issue readouts of "pull asides."

There was no mention of the meeting in a briefing by a senior administration official about U.S. efforts at the security conference. The official said Pompeo met with Masrour Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and that U.S. officials met with Israeli counterparts as well as with a senior EU foreign affairs official, Helga Schmid.
It was not immediately clear why the State Department did not disclose the meeting between Pompeo and his Russian counterpart in advance.

It's been immediately clear why the Trump regime doesn't want to disclose any Russian contacts for four years now, and that immediately clear reason is that the Trump regime is hopelessly compromised by Vladimir Putin.  Literally any other country, the Trump regime trumpets their interactions as "presidential" and "running the ship of state" and "the leader of the free world meets with X"

But Putin?  Lavrov?  Any Russian dignitary?  No readout, no press, the meeting never happened, and always we learn about it later from the Russians.  Every damn time.

When we learn the full truth of how much leverage Putin has over Trump, it'll be a day of national reckoning, one of many we'll face in the coming months.