Here’s The ‘Creepy’ Gap In The Donald Trump-Vladimir Putin Press Conference Video Rachel Maddow Saw
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has found what she calls a “misleading” gap in the press conference video from the Trump-Putin Helsinki summit. Maddow accused the White House of cutting the first part of journalist Jeff Mason’s question from their video Tuesday night.
“What the White House has disappeared from the official U.S. government record of that meeting… is President Putin answering in the affirmative when asked if he wanted Trump to win the election,” Maddow said according to Huffington Post.
Mason reportedly asked Putin at the conference, “Did you want President Trump to win the election and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?”
To which Putin answered, “Yes, I did.”
He also cited that he supported Trump because he wanted to bring the relationship between the U.S. and Russia “back to normal.”
In the White House tape, only the quip about directing Russian officials to help the president was left in. Thus far, the Trump administration has not released a statement detailing why the segment was cut from their coverage.
White House edits video to remove question about whether Putin wanted Trump to win. pic.twitter.com/ExlsHNlgF8
— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) July 25, 2018
Inquisitr reported that Trump initially called Putin’s repeated denials of Russian interference “strong and powerful” following the joint press conference. He later retracted these statements, but also accused the FBI of damaging ties between the two countries. Trump referred to the Russia probe as “a disaster for our country.”
Maddow went on to give the White House credit for at least leaving in “half the question” so that viewers could get a “misleading answer.” She pointed out that the Russian government skipped over the entire segment.
She describes Mason’s question as something “we all saw happen with our own eyes, we all heard happen with our own ears” and notes that it disappeared anyway. Overall, Maddow calls the gap “creepy.”
“You could interpret [Putin’s response] to mean he’s answering ‘yes’ to both,” Mason said to The Atlantic. “[But] looking at it critically, he spent a good chunk of that press conference, just like President Trump did, denying any collusion. So I think it’s likely that when he said ‘Yes, I did,’ that he was just responding to the first part of my question and perhaps didn’t hear the second part.”
The Atlantic was the first to notice the omission and alleges that neither the official transcript of the press conference nor the video contained the Reuters reporter’s entire question. Cutting it out essentially made it ambiguous what exactly “Yes, I did” meant in light of Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election.
