Judge's decision may shine light on secret Trump-Putin meeting notes by alexnazaryan
WASHINGTON — A district court judge in Washington, D.C., has ordered administration lawyers to explain why, for more than two years, the White House has refused to turn over to the State Department an interpreter’s notes from a meeting between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
After the meeting concluded, Tillerson told the press that the two leaders discussed Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, among other topics. But that hardly assuaged those who wondered about Trump’s unusually warm embrace of Putin. Without a written record of the meeting, suspicions about their relationship only increased.
The ruling comes in the midst of an impeachment inquiry focused on Trump’s interactions with another Eastern European leader: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. At the heart of that inquiry is a call between Trump and Zelensky on July 25, during which Trump asked Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Among other allegations related to that call, critics of the president have accused him of manipulating the transcript to downplay evidence of coercion.
The suit was brought by Democracy Forward and American Oversight, both of which are government watchdog organizations that have routinely opposed the Trump administration. And although Tillerson was secretary of state at the time of the Putin-Trump meeting, the suit names his successor, Mike Pompeo, as the defendant. The complaint charges Pompeo with “failure to take any action to recover unlawfully alienated State Department meeting notes” and by failing to adhere to the Federal Records Act.
Democracy Forward saw the ruling as a victory. “President Trump clearly wishes to shield his interactions with foreign leaders even from those within his administration,” attorney Nitin Shah, who argued the case for Democracy Forward before McFadden, told Yahoo News in a statement. “But the law doesn’t allow Secretary Pompeo to turn a blind eye to those efforts. Today’s ruling is a win for government transparency and accountability.
Montgomery, the University of Colorado presidential records expert, offered a withering assessment of his own. “I think it’s absurd,” he said of the government’s case. He said that while the Presidential Records Act does give the president “a lot of discretion,” that discretion does not apply in this case.
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