The Washington Post has poured cold water on a claim by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow that the Trump administration intentionally cut a question asked of Russian President Vladimir Putin last week in Helsinki.
On Tuesday, Maddow reported the White House "skillfully cut" from its video of the event Reuters reporter Jeff Mason asking Putin if he wanted Trump to win the 2016 presidential election. She added the White House's written transcript also excised the question.
But the Post reported its own transcript, provided by Bloomberg, also did not include Mason's query – and the reason for that is nothing but a technical glitch.
“At some point in the middle of that question, there's a switch between the feed from the reporters and the feed from the translator. In the White House version of the video, you can hear the question being asked very faintly … You can hear the same audio in the Post's feed," Philip Bump writes.
He said the transcript was apparently based on what ran on only one channel of the audio feed.
“This is not a conspiracy from the White House. While the White House certainly has a track record of misrepresenting facts, this would have been a remarkably futile revision of reality to attempt. As it turns out, they didn't," Bump writes.
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