Sanders: Questions About 2nd Trump-Putin Meeting Are Just ‘Russia Fever’

Deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Wednesday insisted that President Donald Trump’s second, previously undisclosed meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin was no big deal.

Claims otherwise, according to the White House, are merely “Russia fever.”

“Once again the Russia fever has caught up with the media and everybody ran out and tried to create a story that simply didn’t exist,” Sanders said at an off-camera, audio-only White House briefing. “It’s not a cloud of secrecy.”

Several outlets reported late Tuesday that Trump moved to sit beside Putin at a dinner at the G20 summit in Germany earlier in July. According to the Washington Post, the two spoke for an hour. Putin was accompanied by his official translator, though Trump abandoned his.

Sanders denied that the two leaders spoke for that long.

“It was a brief conversation and certainly not an hour,” she said. “We weren’t following them around with a stopwatch.”

Sanders called it “absolutely absurd” to “act as if this were some secret,” though the White House did not disclose the meeting until it was reported Tuesday night.

“I’m not sure what other announcement should have been made,” Sanders said.

Asked whether Trump trusted Putin’s translator to accurately interpret his side of the conversation, she said, “I believe so.”

Sanders said the event “was a social dinner and that was, you know, the nature of the evening.”

“You guys came and took pictures of it,” she said.

Sanders declined to confirm a Washington Post report that said the United States has withdrawn support from Syrian rebels against Bashar al-Assad’s regime, a move Russia sought. Asked whether the subject came up during Trump’s and Putin’s dinner conversation, she said, “Not that I’m aware of.”

The White House reportedly has no official record of what Trump and Putin discussed.