Rachel Maddow Stands by Report on WH Putin Transcript: Washington Post Doesn’t ‘Disprove Our Report’
White House edits video to remove question about whether Putin wanted Trump to win. pic.twitter.com/ExlsHNlgF8
— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) July 25, 2018
Last night Rachel Maddow questioned the White House omitting a key exchange from the Trump-Putin press conference.
Namely, the part where Reuters’ Jeff Mason asked Vladimir Putin if he wanted President Donald Trump to win in 2016. This is the exchange in question:
PUTIN: …options abound, and they all can be found in an appropriate legal framework.
MASON: President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?
PUTIN: Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the US/Russia relationship back to normal.
The White House’s official transcript has the exchange a little differently:
PUTIN: …options abound, and they all can be found in an appropriate legal framework.
MASON: And did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?
PRESIDENT PUTIN: Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.
However, the Washington Post has a debunking out today saying “this is not a conspiracy from the White House,” explaining that “at some point in the middle of that question, there’s a switch between the feed from the reporters and the feed from the translator” and in the White House feed the question can only be heard “faintly” under the voice of the translator.
Maddow tweeted in response to WaPo today standing by the report and noting the White House transcript has not yet been updated:
This is one possible explanation for why the White House transcript & video from Helsinki doesn’t include Putin saying he wanted Trump to win.
But Putin really did say that in Helsinki…
— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) July 25, 2018
…and the White House transcript & video still does leave it out.
WaPo now says it has updated its own transcript. Will the White House?
After more than a week of reporting on the bad transcript (see link below)…
— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) July 25, 2018
(1): White House has let it stand uncorrected, and
(2): POTUS now asserts that Putin wants *Dems* to win, not him.
I love WaPo with the heat of 1000 suns, but nothing here from WaPo disproves our report.
3/3
— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) July 25, 2018
[image via screengrab]
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