>Whether his translator’s notes hold anything incriminating about Trump’s fealty to Putin, it is appalling that he would go into a one-on-one meeting with the Russian president without a note taker—especially given his shallow grasp of the issues and the very real possibility that he could have given away U.S. interests or disclosed vital secrets without understanding what he was doing. He also conducted his one-on-one with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, at their summit in Singapore, without a note taker present.

>The irony—and perhaps the tragedy, for U.S. foreign policy and possibly (depending on what he did tell Putin) for Trump personally—is that the Russians, and probably the North Koreans, do have records of their one-on-one sessions with Trump. Putin did bring along a note taker. It is also likely that he or one of his aides tape-recorded the conversations. (The photograph of their tête-à-tête in Helsinki reveals a suspicious vase of flowers on the table between them.)