White House red-faced over pictures of Donald Trump meeting Russian Ambassador Sergey Lavrov
RUSSIA has humiliated the White House by releasing pictures of Donald Trump getting cosy with “the biggest perpetrator of fake news” in the Oval Office.
THEY’RE the photographs Donald Trump didn’t want us to see.
Happy snaps of the smiling US President shaking hands with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office have left White House officials red-faced after their release by Russian media on Twitter.
The meeting was a closed-door affair, and the White House had barred media from attending. The only photographers in the room were the official White House photographer and a photographer from Tass, a Russian state-run news agency.
Journalists were later allowed into the Oval Office and found Trump sitting alone with Henry Kissinger, who was national security adviser and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations.
But by then it was too late.
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeted photos from inside the Oval Office, followed by the Russian Embassy, which released a picture of Trump smiling as he shook hands with Sergey Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador in Washington. Kislyak has been a key figure in investigations of alleged ties between Trump associates and the Russian government.
Ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn resigned for possibly misrepresenting conversations he had with Kislyak months before Trump took office.
Some White House officials are said to be fuming at the decision to ban American media in favour of a “propaganda arm of a foreign government.”
“This isn’t an ‘America First’ policy let the biggest perpetrator of fake news into the Oval Office,” one official told The Daily Beast of the meeting with Kislyak.
“[Trump] is either in bed with the Russians or too stupid to understand the severity of this mistake. Either way, the implications are truly terrifying.”
The White House was blindsided that the photo ended up on social media — and was used by Russia to troll the US, theNew York Post reports.
“They tricked us,” one White House complained to CNN. “That’s the problem with the Russians — they lie.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry also tweeted a video of Lavrov cracking a sarcastic joke about FBI director James Comey’s shock sacking after meeting with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, which was open to the press.
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