KELI From Inkwell, this is the Independent News Drop. It's Saturday, May thirtieth. The time is six a.m. Central. I'm Keli, and Hast is with me.
HAST Good morning. We're leading with something from our Ground News desk — a seven-year-old memo that resurfaced this week, and it matters for how we read current diplomacy.
KELI Back in May of 2017, Trump sat down with Russian officials in the Oval Office. American press was kept out. A Russian state photographer was in the room. And according to a classified memo that leaked, Trump told them he wasn't concerned about election interference because, as he put it, the US does the same in other countries. The memo landed in the press for a few weeks as part of the larger coverage around the Russia investigation. Then it disappeared from the conversation almost entirely.
HAST The structural point here: most newsrooms framed the Russia story as a threat Trump wasn't taking seriously enough. That was the through-line of the Mueller coverage. But this memo showed something different — it showed Trump articulating a specific view. He wasn't dismissing the threat. He was saying American and Russian interference were equivalent, and therefore he saw no reason to treat one as a violation.
KELI That's a falsifiable point. If that's actually Trump's position, we should see it reflected in how his administration handles Russian operations going forward. We should see it in the kinds of sanctions or counter-measures — or absence of them — that get proposed. And we should hear it echo if he ever addresses the subject directly. Watch the next few weeks of State Department statements on interference allegations. That'll tell you whether this memo was a one-off comment or a window into consistent thinking.
HAST Staying with the region — Tom Barrack, Trump's special envoy for Syria and Iraq, is stepping down from his formal post, according to Secretary of State Rubio. But here's the thing: Barrack's not really leaving. He's moving into an unofficial advisory role on Syria policy, which actually gives him more flexibility and less public scrutiny.
KELI This one's an update to a story that's been moving quietly for months. Barrack's been central to the administration's approach in the Middle East. The formal title change doesn't change the actual influence. It's a reshuffle that looks like a departure.
HAST Different scale entirely, but there's a rescue operation still underway in Laos. Four more men have been freed from a flooded cave system where they were trapped searching for gold. The BBC reports that two of the seven villagers who went into those narrow tunnels on the twentieth of May are still unaccounted for. This has been going for ten days now. The cave system is extremely complex, and water levels are still rising with the season.
KELI On a different continent — Colombia's opening up areas that were off-limits during decades of conflict. The Mavecure Mountains rise out of the Amazon jungle in a region that tourists couldn't safely visit for a long time. Now they're starting to come back, and NPR's been looking at what's there: rare wildlife, indigenous sacred sites, and some extraordinary landscape. It's one of those stories where the news is that something is becoming possible again.
HAST Lighter shift next. The National Transportation Safety Board has a privacy problem they didn't anticipate. Cockpit voice recordings in crash investigations are kept confidential — it's policy to protect pilot dignity and encourage candid communication in the cockpit. But someone used digital imaging technology to reconstruct audio from one of those recordings, and now the NTSB had to temporarily take their entire docket system offline. The question becomes: how do you keep sensitive data private in an age when AI can reconstruct it from images?
KELI Before we close, one date marker. Today is Memorial Day. Seventy years ago this morning, in 1958, two unidentified American servicemen — one killed in World War II, one in Korea — were laid to rest at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery.
HAST That's the Independent News Drop. We'll be back this evening. From Inkwell.