Yahoo News reports:

A district court judge in Washington, D.C., has ordered administration lawyers to explain why, for more than two years, the White House has refused to turn over to the State Department an interpreter’s notes from a meeting between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

That meeting took place in the summer of 2017, during a summit of the G-20 nations in Hamburg, Germany. The two men got along so well that the meeting, which was supposed to last an hour, ran to 137 minutes. In the room with Putin were Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, along with two interpreters — one American and the other Russian.

As the lengthy meeting concluded, Trump confiscated notes from the State Department interpreter, thus depriving American diplomats — and, according to an ongoing lawsuit, the American public — of the lone U.S. government record of what exactly was said.

After the meeting concluded, Tillerson told the press that the two leaders discussed Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, among other topics. But that hardly assuaged those who wondered about Trump’s unusually warm embrace of Putin. Without a written record of the meeting, suspicions about their relationship only increased.

On Wednesday, Judge Trevor McFadden rejected the administration’s argument that the notes were a presidential record outside the purview of the Federal Records Act, which describes how executive-branch agencies must preserve documents. McFadden is giving the government 90 days to further explain its position but seems disposed to eventually have the White House turn over the translator’s notes to the State Department, in keeping with the dictates of the Federal Records Act.

While that would not mean those notes would be immediately made available to the public, it would potentially make those records subject to eventual release under the Freedom of Information Act, which is the ultimate goal of the current lawsuit. [Continue reading…]