First, Russian involvement in the 2016 election was fake news, a non-story.  Then when the special counsel indicted twelve Russian intelligence agents for hacking the election Donald Trump blamed his predecessor.

Meanwhile, Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin will go on as scheduled Monday. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is  playing up what he says is the importance of the meeting.  CNN reports:

“Despite calls by top Democrats in Congress for Trump to cancel the meeting, Pompeo told reporters on his flight back from Mexico Friday night, ‘I think it’s very important that they meet… I am confident that President Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin will put America in a better place,’ Pompeo said.”

Trump reportedly wants to meet with Putin one-on-one, no staff invited, only translators. Note this one-on-one format was not Putin’s idea, it was all Trump.

It is puzzling that Trump isn’t even allowing top aides to be in the room.

It is unprecedented to have no one else in the room, and there are grave concerns that Putin will Trump like a fiddle.  No historic record?  How will anyone know what was actually said.  Maybe that’s the point. This is what Trump said Friday when he was asked what he wanted to achieve in the meeting:

“We will talk about a number of things: Ukraine, Syria, the Middle East, nuclear proliferation. We are massively modernizing and fixing and buying and it’s just a devastating technology. It is a very bad policy, we have no choice. We are massively big and they are very big and I’ll be talking about nuclear proliferation. I will absolutely bring up meddling. Hopefully, we will have a very good relationship with Russia, China, and other countries.”

As for what Putin gets out of the meeting. It certainly seems he has a lot more to gain. NBC reports:

“Putin is eager to normalize relations with the U.S., which does relatively little trade with Russia and has levied painful sanctions on Putin government officials and associates over Russia’s incursions into Ukraine and its cyberattacks against the U.S.

Putin has been hard at work in recent years trying to rebuild Russian strength, which is helped in part by the perception created by relatively low-cost tampering with elections not only in the U.S. but in the western Balkans and across Europe.”

The meeting will happen in Finland Monday at 6am ET.