Yesterday Fred Fleitz posted an article at The National Review about some recent claims regarding President Trump and Russia (will we ever get past this foolishness?).
The article reports:
On Sunday, the mainstream media launched a new ploy to promote their Trump-Russia collusion narrative with a story that first appeared in the Washington Post titled “Officials in dark on Putin talks.” A similar piece was published in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, titled “Trump didn’t use notetakers at Putin/ Meeting.” Cable-news networks and Democratic congressmen claim these stories indicate that President Trump held secret discussions with Russian president Putin that were revealed to no one. For example, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) told CNN on Sunday that the U.S. government “does not know” what Trump and Putin discussed.
It is now clear that these stories were misleading, if not mostly false. First, they neglected to mention that the president’s decision to restrict access to read-outs of his two one-on-one meetings with Putin were due to the extraordinary number of leaks to the press of his phone calls and meetings with foreign officials at the beginning of his presidency.
Second, it is untrue that senior officials are unaware of what was discussed in President Trump’s meetings with Putin.
Now that we know that President Trump was under surveillance for political reasons by the FBI and the Department of Justice during the early days of his presidency, why are we surprised that he took precautions to make sure he had the privacy presidents are usually accorded.
The article concludes:
The media’s claim that this story amounts to a U.S. president concealing his secret discussions with the Russian president as part of his alleged collusion with Russia is fake news. Senior U.S. officials knew exactly what was discussed in these meetings. This story is really about a successful effort by President Trump to prevent anti-Trump government officials from leaking sensitive national-security information to the press.
After a while, you begin to wonder what President Trump could accomplish if he didn’t have to spend so much time fighting the political establishment, the media, and the deep state.