On Saturday night’s episode of MSNBC’s The Weekend: Primetime, Hylton spoke to former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul—an Obama appointee—about Trump’s summit with Putin in Anchorage on Friday.
“A lot of the press corps that was there, they reported in the minutes and hours after the presser that they saw members of the administration, like Karoline Leavitt, look ashen, almost frightened after what they had seen behind closed doors. What did that indicate to you?” Hylton asked McFaul.
McFaul responded, “We should all be glad that we did not go to Alaska, because I was in Helsinki with you. And I was in Geneva when President Biden met. They traveled a long way for nothing in return, those journalists.”
He continued, ”But that suggests to me that this was a bigger disaster than they’re letting on. To your point, they’re trying to spin it, although they’re not even trying to spin it. That’s a really interesting thing.”
”When I worked at the White House and we would have meetings like this, I was the SAO—the senior administration official—that would call up journalists, that would call The New York Times to say, ‘This is what was discussed,’ to push it this way. They’re not even attempting to do that because they know they don’t have anything to work with.”
Yep. Everyone in that room was owned, but didn’t think much of what that meant until then. That one report by the fox news lady right afterwards was blunt as hell when describing the whole situation. ‘It was not good.’
I’m OOTL what happened?
link to an MSN article that has the video, since the only other embeds I can find are twitter links right now.
Basically, some WH press pool lady from foxnews gave the rundown of the event right after it happened. Her blunt summation of the event was ‘it was not good, it did not feel like things went well, it seems Putin came in and Steamrolled, got his photo and left.’ She then immediately rips into the fact that the US is the host nation and yet Putin came up to the podium and spoke first, in russian, which is just not how it happens. Basically laid out that even Trump’s friendly network realized just how fucked this situation was.
For the other part of my comment about them getting chewed out, she wasn’t involved in that, but at least one reporter mentioned the admin folks (leavitt et al) as leaving the behind closed doors meeting with ashen faces; meaning whatever we didn’t see was worse than having a foreign dictator come in and publicly flaunt all diplomatic norms while our president paced the red carpet like a dog.
Jesus fucking Christ that’s so bad. She’s clearly downplaying it (“we need all the pieces”) and it’s on Fox but it’s so bad even she can’t spin it. She’s clearly shocked and it sounds like it’s one of those moments that you had to be there to see just how awful it was. Ashen faced is scary, god only knows what happened. It’s Trump and Putin so literally nearly anything is possible.