In Anchorage, guests of one of the hotels came across printed materials of the US State Department, which related to the organization of a meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska. The documents were found in a public printer at a business center located at the Captain Cook Hotel, located about twenty minutes from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, where the Aug. 15 leadership meeting took place.
As reported American National Public Radio (NPR) has learned that on Friday morning, August 15, three guests found a package of eight pages of documents containing previously undisclosed and potentially confidential details of the summit. NPR obtained photos of the footage taken by an eyewitness.
The first page of the printed packet outlined the meeting schedule for August 15, with the exact names of the rooms at the Anchorage base where the talks were to take place. It was also recorded there that Donald Trump planned to give Putin a symbolic gift — a statue of a bald eagle.
Pages two through five contained the names and phone numbers of three U.S. officials, as well as a list of 13 U.S. and Russian officials scheduled to attend the summit. For the Russian participants, they even provided phonetic transcriptions, among which was “Mr. President POO-tihn”.
The sixth and seventh pages of the documents described the procedure for serving lunch and the seating protocol. The lunch was to be held “in honor of His Excellency Vladimir Putin.” According to the scheme, Putin and Trump should have sat opposite each other. To Trump’s right were to be Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. From left are Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff. Putin was supposed to be with his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and foreign policy adviser, Yuriy Ushakov.
The menu consisted of three courses: green salad, filet mignon, and Olympic-style halibut, and creme brulee for dessert. However, on the day of the summit, lunch was canceled, and this point of the plan was not implemented.
According to the documents, the initial format of the negotiations provided for a tete-a-tete meeting between Trump and Putin only in the presence of their advisors — Steve Witkoff and Yuriy Ushakov. At least sixty minutes were allotted for the joint press conference after the negotiations. But in fact, the heads of the foreign policy departments of the two countries – Marco Rubio and Serhiy Lavrov – also took part in the meeting. The press conference did not take place in the classic form: after the conversation, Trump and Putin only read their statements to journalists and refused to answer questions.
John Michaels, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who teaches a course on national security, said the incident with the discovery of documents at a hotel in Alaska shows serious flaws in the organization of meetings of this level.
“This is another proof of the carelessness and incompetence of the administration. You cannot leave documents in the printer. This is an elementary thing,” he said.
NPR reminds us that this case is not isolated. Earlier this week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents accidentally added a stranger to a private law enforcement chat where they were discussing the search for a convicted murderer. And in March, national security chiefs inadvertently included a journalist in a group chat about future military strikes in Yemen.
