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Translated by: Flutura Gashi-Mehmeti
- August 17, 2025 14:26
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Documents marked with the US State Department's logo, found Friday morning in the business center of an Alaska hotel, revealed previously undisclosed and potentially sensitive details about the August 15 meetings between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage.
Eight pages, apparently produced by US team staff and accidentally left behind, contained the exact locations and times of summit meetings and the phone numbers of US government employees.
At around 9:00 a.m. Friday, three guests at the Captain Cook Hotel, a four-star hotel located 20 minutes from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage where leaders from the U.S. and Russia were gathering, found documents left behind on one of the hotel's public printers.
The front page revealed the sequence of meetings for August 15, including the specific names of the rooms inside the Anchorage base where they would take place. It also revealed that Trump intended to give Putin a ceremonial gift.
"POTUS for President Putin," the document reads, "American Bald Eagle Statue."
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On Saturday, White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly dismissed the documents as a "multi-page lunch menu" and suggested that leaving the information on a public printer did not constitute a security breach. The U.S. State Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Pages 2 through 5 of the documents listed the names and phone numbers of three U.S. staff members, as well as the names of 13 U.S. and Russian heads of state. The list provided phonetic pronunciations for all the Russian men expected to attend the summit, including one that read "Mr. President POO-tihn."
Pages 6 and 7 described how lunch would be served at the summit and for whom. A menu included in the documents indicated that the lunch would be held "in honor of His Excellency Vladimir Putin."
A seating chart shows that Putin and Trump were to sit across from each other during lunch.
Trump would be accompanied by six officials: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to his right, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Special Envoy for Peace Missions Steve Witkoff to his left. Putin would sit immediately next to his Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his Foreign Policy Assistant Yuri Ushakov.
During Friday's summit, lunch was apparently canceled. But documents showed it was supposed to be a simple three-course meal.
Jon Michaels, a UCLA law professor who lectures on national security, said the documents found on the Alaska hotel printer reveal a lack of professional judgment in preparing for a high-stakes meeting.
"It seems to me like further evidence of the administration's carelessness and incompetence," Michaels said. "You just don't leave things in the printers. It's that simple," he added.
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The leaked documents are the latest example of a series of security breaches by Trump administration officials. Earlier this week, members of a law enforcement chat group that included members of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) added a random person to a conversation about an ongoing search for a convicted attempted murderer.
In March, US national security leaders accidentally included a journalist in a group chat about impending military strikes in Yemen.
