Putin offers to provide transcript of meeting with Trump

Putin said he’s prepared to release a written transcript of a meeting between Trump and Russian officials, showing that no US national security secrets were passed on to the Kremlin. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday said that he could prove that US President Donald Trump did not pass on any national security secrets to Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at a meeting last week in the Oval Office of the White House.

“If the administration of the United States deems it permissible, we are ready to provide a record of the conversation between Lavrov and Trump to the Senate and the US Congress,” Putin said Wednesday during a joint press conference in Sochi, Russia, with Italian Prime Minister Paola Gentiloni.

Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said that while Putin did not have a recording of last week’s meeting, a written transcript was available.

The Russian leader also joked about penalizing Lavrov for not handing over any secrets. “I spoke to (Lavrov) today,” Putin said sarcastically. “I’ll be forced to issue him with a reprimand because he did not share these secrets with us; not with me, nor with representatives of Russia’s intelligence services. It was very bad of him.”

The Russian President then adopted a stern tone, saying that there could be “no other explanation” besides “political schizophrenia” and “anti-Russian sentiment” on the part of US lawmakers for contending that Moscow got its hands on classified information.

“Either they don’t understand the damage they’re doing to their own country, in which case they are simply stupid, or they understand everything, in which case they are dangerous and corrupt,” Putin declared.

“At first, when we watched how this process of the internal political struggle was developing, we thought it was funny, but today it is not just sad, it causes us concern because it’s hard to imagine what else people who produce such nonsense will come up with,” he said.

By: Jonathan Benedek, World Israel News