National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien made good Friday on President Trump’s transparency pledge in the Russia collusion case, releasing in its entirety a previously heavily redacted document from the Robert Mueller probe showing why Russian diplomats met with Trump in May 2017.
The memo, which was originally released Wednesday with only three words visible, shows National Security Council official Eric Ciaramella wrote on May 10, 2017 that Trump chose to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during a visit to Washington based on a request eight days earlier during a phone call with Russian president Vladimir Putin.
“May 2, 2017: Putin asks POTUS to receive Lavrov when he stops through DC en route to Arctic Ministerial in Fairbanks, Alaska (a longplanned international meeting); POTUS agrees, and preparations begin,” Ciaramella wrote fellow NSC official William R. Kelly, explaining the origins of the Lavrov meeting.
You can see the unredacted version here:
You can see the originally redacted memo here.
The memo was first flagged in a footnote of Mueller’s final investigative report on the Russia collusion probe in spring 2019, in part because the Lavrov meeting became the subject of a news media leak that claimed Trump called James Comey a “nut job” during the gathering and told the Russian foreign minister the FBI director had just been fired…
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