up changing around my schedule because i was just getting ready to go in a couple of days, so i said it was the only time i ever met him. we had one dinner together sessions? yeah, i said it was great to meet you. i m glad i was able to meet this before i head to moscow. i mean, totally in passing. all right, so, david, carter page s comments, does it clear things up or fuel more questions about russia and the trump campaign? i think we still have things to learn. i don t think it necessarily clears things up. carter page has made himself available to the media in various instances. josh has interviewed him, where he has tried to put out a story that he s going to compartmentalize his dealings as a private citizen and dealings with the trump campaign and maybe that s the case, but certainly doesn t help with all of the other details that we know swirling around other members of the the trump orbit. right, you had senator sessions at one point meeting with atmosphere kislyak,
carter page doesn t seem to be helping himself or the trump team by doing continuing interviews on this, but the overall story that came out last night that he went to moscow and that trump campaign knew about it and he met with a russian official, that s old news. spoking of which not being able to recall, president trump insisting he can t recall a campaign meeting during the election when foreign policy adviser george papadopoulos floated the idea of setting up the visit between trump and russian president vladimir putin. here s president trump yesterday, and about what he can and cannot remember. i don t remember much about that meeting. it was a very unimportant meeting, took place a long time. don t remember much about it. i m a very intelligent person. one of the great memories of all time. so, david, the president, you know, has said he has one of the greatest memories of all time. what s going on here? yeah, it was just last week that he reiterated that claim, that h
from ultimately all these questions swirling around the administration about what russia did to try and up end our democratic process. josh, how do you see it, advantageous or, you know, potentially dangerous if the two were to meet? no, there s no problem with president trump meeting with president putin. they should meet. that s part of regular diplomacy. it s part of trump s job. i agree with david, the problem could be what he says both inside the meeting and after the meeting and how does that maybe disjoint with u.s. policy, but i would point out here, you know, just from your opening, right, the story of trump and putin s relationship is being overtaken by the continuing drip, drip, drip of revelations from the russia investigation and yesterday is a good example, because actually, in fact, carter page admitted to meeting deputy prime minister during his trip to moscow last year, in an interview with the washington post, that s been public for 13 months, but yesterday the
even though as jessica just reported, j.d. gordon, who was sitting there in that meeting next to george papadopoulos has a different sort of recollection of how things went. the president also, when george papadopoulos was named as one of the people indicted on monday, the president portrayed it that he was a low level person, didn t have a clear recollection of, but i wonder if he remembers when the president sat down with the candidate with the washington post editorial board he listed off george papadopoulos as one of his key foreign policy advisers at that point in the campaign. special counsel bob mueller has to be listening to this very closely and potentially trying to extract whether it could be beneficial to the investigation. right. and the bottom line is, we don t know. we don t know what he knows, we don t know if it is really substantial to the investigation. i mean, the context here is important. back at that time, the trump during the primaries the trump foreign po
him to stay on message and for him to go off message, too, and it will be largely up to the president whether or not he can take this chance to spend 12 days focusing on foreign policy, the real problems in asia, the real opportunities in asia, and ignore some of the distractions. his record on that so far has not been great. because the questions will come, if there s an opportunity to ask the question worldwide, it s going to happen. david, one of the concerns on the trip is trump s tendency to use words like little rocket man and other inflammatory language about north korea, something national security adviser h.r. mcmaster talked about several times this week. take a listen. the president will use whatever language he wants to use, obviously. i don t think the president really modulates his language. have you noticed? he s been very clear about it. i ve been aware of the discussions about his flam toir, what s inflammatory is the north korean regime and what they are doing to