President Donald Trump's second meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the G20 summit is nothing out of the ordinary despite media reports, veteran political commentator Michael Reagan tells Newsmax TV.
"The media thinks they need to be involved in everything. They need to be there. I dare the media to find the press release and the announcement from the White House when my father went into Grenada. It didn't happen. Why? Because he didn't trust the press to report it correctly," Reagan, President Ronald Reagan's eldest son, said Wednesday to Miranda Khan on Newsmax's "America Talks Live."
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In February 1983, President Reagan secretly visited Grenada following a U.S. invasion of the Caribbean island nation, which was in the middle of a civil war.
"He worried that they would leak the information and people would die because of that. He didn't trust the press. He didn't trust the press when he went into Tripoli with a couple of planes in the middle of the night [following the bombing of Libya]. The president doesn't always trust the press," Reagan told Khan.
On Tuesday, the White House confirmed that Trump and Putin held a second, previously undisclosed conversation during a dinner for G20 leaders at a summit earlier this month in Germany.
The two leaders held a formal two-hour bilateral meeting on July 7 in which Trump later said Putin denied allegations that he directed efforts to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The White House official did not say how long the second meeting took place or what was discussed.
"The press doesn't need to be present in every little meeting, every get-together, every innuendo that goes on. And as he said the G20 was having dinner. They saw the talk [between him and Putin] going on," Reagan said.
"You had the two leaders of the biggest superpowers of the world having a private discussion and I imagine some people were a bit jealous of it, but those things go on. All the time leaders are picking up the phone and calling each other without having the media listening in on the conversation."
The bottom line, Reagan said, is that the private chitchat represented no breach of government protocol.
"Not at all. It was two people sitting basically next to each other having a discussion and there's no protocol issue here. They were at a dinner. Everybody was invited. The wives were invited. The G20 people were there," he said.
"They're really making something out of nothing. As the president would say again, fake news [is] trying to find a story where there really isn't one."
Reagan, a Newsmax contributor, is the author of "Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan," written with Jim Denney and published by Humanix Books.
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