Remember that time Donald Trump was leaving the country to meet with Vladimir Putin and the headlines were full of headlines about the Trump-Russia investigation? Sorry, make that remember those times, plural.
NBC News offers up a timeline of Trump foreign trips and the investigation headlines that always seem to coincide with them, and consider: In early July of 2017, Trump headed off to the G-20 meetings, where he met with Putin a couple times, once secretly. That was the weekend we all learned about the Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr. and the Russians.
Then in July 2018, Trump went to Finland to meet with Putin as Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russians for hacking the Democratic National Committee’s emails.
And now Trump is in Argentina, where he was slated to meet with Putin and then canceled, only to have Putin refuse to accept the cancellation, leading to a pre-announced “impromptu” meeting, amid Michael Cohen’s latest guilty plea and his cooperation, and the implosion of Paul Manafort’s cooperation deal.
But here’s the thing: It’s not just when Trump is going to meet with Putin that his foreign trips are accompanied by bombshell Russia investigation headlines. Trump’s November 2017 Asia trip was immediately preceded by Mueller’s indictments of Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Rick Gates. Trump’s January 2018 trip to Davos coincided with the report that he’d tried to have Mueller fired.
It’s true that there are enough headlines in this saga that it might be difficult to find dates when there weren’t significant developments, and to be scrupulously accurate there have been a couple Trump trips unaccompanied by major Russia investigation headlines. But even so, these are noteworthy. Conclusion: Trump should leave the country more.
