Now we learn that the president also failed to disclose a one-on-one meeting this month with Russian President Vladimir Putin at which only a Russian translator was present. No one in the Trump delegation sought to disclose this in all the press briefings and interviews. The incident came to light only because European leaders agitated by the president’s private chat decided to spill the beans. The Post reports:

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At some point during the meal, [President] Trump left his own seat to occupy a chair next to Putin. Trump approached alone, and Putin was attended only by his official interpreter. In a statement issued Tuesday night after published reports of the conversation, the White House said that “there was no ‘second meeting’ between President Trump and President Putin, just a brief conversation at the end of a dinner. The insinuation that the White House has tried to ‘hide’ a second meeting,” it said, “is false, malicious and absurd.” “All the leaders” circulated around the room throughout the dinner, and “President Trump spoke with many leaders,” the statement said. “As the dinner was concluding,” it said, Trump spoke “briefly” with Putin, who was seated next to first lady Melania Trump.

Actually, the meeting lasted about an hour, according to Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, who broke the story. “The odd issue here, as has been the case with this White House when it comes to connections with the Russians, is that the Administration didn’t disclose this meeting when it had many opportunities to do so,” Alina Polyakova of the Atlantic Council observes. “As a result, suspicions grow.”

Trump’s eagerness to chat up Putin beyond the prying ears and eyes of U.S. officials and/or allies fits the pattern of incessant, hush-hush conversations between the Trump team and Russian officials.

“I have more questions than answers right now,” former ambassador Eric Edelman tells Right Turn. “Did POTUS debrief senior staff after the meeting? Do we have a record of what was said? Did they agree on anything? What will the Russians claim about it? Why didn’t [Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson brief on it?”

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We certainly have a bonanza of “colluding” — secretly during the campaign (at Trump Tower), publicly during the campaign when Trump encouraged Russian hacking of Democrats and (undisclosed) during the transition when Kushner and Michael T. Flynn continued their forays without supervision from the Obama team. But let’s not forget the administration’s immediate efforts after taking office to roll back Russia sanctions, its current foot-dragging over new sanctions, Trump’s sharing of code-word intelligence information with Russian officials in the Oval Office and now this unsupervised confab in Hamburg that no one thought to bring up until now.

Each time the Trump team has a meeting with Russians out of the purview of intelligence professionals it creates the potential for confusion and risks compromising the presidency (as to what might have been said and as to the meeting itself). Recall former acting attorney general Sally Yates warned that when Flynn lied about contacts with Russians, he became a security risk. “We weren’t the only ones who knew about all of these. The Russians knew what General Flynn had done,” Yates said in testimony in May. “They likely had proof of this information. And that created a compromise situation, a situation where the national security adviser essentially could be blackmailed by the Russians.” The plethora of furtive conversations with Russian officials underscores the sense of desperation Trump exudes to stay in the Kremlin’s good graces, perhaps as a result of indebtedness (either political or financial). These tête-à-têtes convey to Putin how weak and easily manipulated the egocentric, clueless American president really is. And of course, these exchanges raise the possibility that the Trump team is giving something improper to Russia (or vice versa) as part of an unholy alliance between the American blunderbuss president and the leader of our greatest international foe.

No other president during or after the Cold War has interacted in this manner with the Russians. Fortunately, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is on the case, already seeking to question the participants in the Trump Jr. meeting last June.