Federal Judge Allows Lawsuit To Proceed Over Missing Notes Of Trump-Putin Meeting

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has dismissed a motion filed by the U.S. State Department to toss out the lawsuit filed against it, over the missing notes of face-to-face meetings of President Donald Trump and the Russian President Vladimir Putin, by a couple of left-leaning groups, including American Oversight and Democracy Forward.

American Oversight and Democracy Forward sued Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the State Department, the National Archives and Records Administration and the archivist of the U.S. in June over the missing notes.

The two groups charge that Pompeo violated the Federal Records Act by allowing Trump to confiscate meeting notes prepared by State Department employees and for failing to preserve them.

The order by McFadden, a Trump appointee, means that the lawsuit will be allowed to move forward and gives the government until January 10 to say if Pompeo complied with federal records law or show why he was not obligated to do so. Pompeo will then have until the middle of March to produce the State Department’s record of evidence.

The Washington Post first reported in January that Trump had gone to “extraordinary” lengths to conceal the details of his meetings with Putin, seizing the notes of his interpreter after the leaders’ first meeting in 2017 and ordering the translator not to disclose details of the discussion. The Post reported that no detailed record of Trump’s communications with Putin existed, prompting a flurry of document requests from Congress and outside groups.

Trump and Putin have met in person multiple times, including a handful of occasions where few, if any, other U.S. officials were present. The disclosure of a lack of records came in the midst of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

“The administration has done everything it can to hide what Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump discussed in Hamburg,” Austin Evers, executive director at American Oversight, said in a statement in response to Wednesday’s ruling. “Today’s ruling is an important step to ensuring the government complied with its legal obligations.”

Democracy Forward’s senior counsel also cheered the order. “President Trump clearly wishes to shield his interactions with foreign leaders even from those within his administration. But the law doesn’t allow Secretary Pompeo to turn a blind eye to those efforts,” Nitin Shah said in a statement, calling the ruling “a win for government transparency and accountability.”

The State Department declined to comment on pending litigation.

Trump’s efforts to keep under wraps the details of his conversations with other world leaders have taken on a new light in the wake of the ongoing impeachment inquiry.

Article by Rajeet Guha