Steve Witkoff Used Kremlin Translators For 3 High-Level Meetings – Excuse Me?

Y’all. Here’s more stupidity from the White House, and yes, it pisses me off. I seem to be good at finding subjects for that lately. Actually, this turned into a rant so it’s kinda long again. But really, now – Witkoff didn’t have a US translator? Ooooo, now THAT is a problem! You can’t depend on the Kremlin translator actually properly doing their job for the US. You *know* there are things that weren’t included, things that would have shown more of Putin’s thinking. This is Bad with a capital B, and that rhymes with T and T is for translator!

How, how, HOW could he have done that? What did Putin slide in without Witkoff knowing? What are the agreements slanted more towards what Putin wants and less towards what the US wants for Ukraine? I think he needs to get his OWN damn translator and start over! Of all the stupid things, this is a pretty big one! From The Telegraph:

Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia, called Mr Witkoff’s decision “a very bad idea” that put him at a “real disadvantage”.

“I speak Russian and have listened to Kremlin interpreters and US interpreters at the same meeting, and the language is never the same,” Mr McFaul told NBC News.

A video of Mr Witkoff’s visit to the Kremlin on April 25 showed Putin greeting him with open arms. He did not appear to be accompanied by advisers who usually support US officials at negotiations.

When a woman joined Mr Witkoff on his side of the table, he pointed at her and said: “Interpreter? From the embassy? OK.”

Mr McFaul also said that using a US interpreter also ensures a more accurate written account of the meeting for the rest of the government, known as a memorandum of conversation or “memcon”. “At the end of every meeting that I attended, I debriefed the interpreter to make sure we heard everything correctly, to get the ‘memcom’ exactly right. You can’t do that using a Russian official,” he said.

WHAM. Bingo! You can’t debrief a Russian translator, and you can’t be *sure* of what was said. Doing this is like trying to light candles in the wind. “Ain’t gonna happen.” We can’t even be sure of what was said! As I read through this and a second article from MSNBC, the last line in the quote below nails it perfectly.

Mr McFaul said this could create problems for other senior members of the Trump administration, such as Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, and Keith Kellogg, the US special envoy to Ukraine.

“How does Kellogg know what Witkoff agreed to with Putin? He only knows it through a ‘memcom’,” he added.

Mr Witkoff’s conduct in high-profile negotiations has previously been called into question, with another source previously saying he was a “nice guy, but a bumbling f—ing idiot”.

Indeed. The man is a real estate tycoon and cryptocurrency trader. He’s supposed to negotiate with Russia on ending the war. That’s impossible without your own translator, at least in my eyes. Agent Orange has some bright ideas that are nothing but bad. This is most definitely one of them. Come on now, the guy has no idea what he’s doing, and really, no idea what Russia is saying.

He needs to get gone, and someone with even a modicum of negotiating skills needs to go there in his place. Put him back in the Middle East, where he originally started. He’s not going to mess things up as badly there. And I believe all the leaders speak English.

If my brain is working correctly, ha, he was in a meeting with Putin and also involved in Signalgate 1 WHILE HE WAS IN THAT MEETING. Good gods. I’d say it was highly possible that someone was peeking over his shoulder, watching the whole thing. It might have been electronically instead of an actual person, but I’m betting Russia followed what “we” were saying. Okay, one more quick quote for you, and then I’ll wind this up.

Complicating matters, Witkoff has acknowledged — out loud and on the record — that he doesn’t fully know what he’s doing.

“I underestimated the complications in the job, that’s for sure,” Witkoff told Tucker Carlson in March. “I think I was a little bit quixotic in the way that I thought about it. Like, I’m going to roll in there on a white horse. And no, it was anything but that, you know.”

Is there really no one else in Trump world who could do this critically important work?

There *has* to be someone. We just don’t know about this person yet. I’m so, so, so concerned about him trying to negotiate with Russia. How in the hell could he think a Kremlin translator would tell him everything? Did he even take notes? We won’t, and can’t, at this point, know what was said. It’s far too late to fix those now, but it needs to be fixed for the future. Do. Not. Trust. Kremlin. Translators. Please let someone with a clue take his place. We don’t need any more of a mess. We don’t need any more of an agreement slanted towards Russia. We need a balanced end to this war, or it will never stop. Ohhhhhhh, I want it to stop. But we shall see, right? We shall see. (Bonus points if you recognized the song I used in the first paragraph! If not the song, what show is it from?) Thanks for sticking with me!

*****And now, please read ******

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