Amateur hour at the Alaska summit.
Papers with U.S. State Department markings, found Friday morning in the business center of an Alaskan hotel, revealed previously undisclosed and potentially sensitive details about the Aug. 15 meetings between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in Anchorage.
Eight pages, that appear to have been produced by U.S. staff and left behind accidentally, shared precise locations and meeting times of the summit and phone numbers of U.S. government employees.
At around 9 a.m. on Friday, three guests at Hotel Captain Cook, a four-star hotel located 20 minutes from the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage where
leaders from the U.S. and Russia convened, found the documents left behind in one of the hotel's public printers. NPR reviewed photos of the documents taken by one of the guests, who NPR agreed not to identify because the guest said they feared retaliation…..
…..Jon Michaels, a professor of law at UCLA who lectures about national security, said that the documents found in the printer of the Alaskan hotel reveal a lapse in professional judgement in preparation for a high-stakes meeting.
"It strikes me as further evidence of the sloppiness and the incompetence of the administration," said Michaels. "You just don't leave things in printers. It's that simple."
The printed papers are the latest example of a series of security breaches by officials of the Trump administration. Earlier this week, members of a law enforcement group chat that included members of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
added a random person to a conversation about an ongoing search for a convicted attempted murderer. In March, U.S. national security leaders accidentally included a journalist in a
group chat about impending military strikes in Yemen.
www.theguardian.com
