Agreed. Anything involving a subpoena or similar summons requires getting advice personally.
We shouldn’t have to wonder. All meetings involving officials should be public record. There’s a reason why we have open meetings and freedom of information laws for governmental matters. Those principles should apply to inter-governmental matters as well. Even if there is some compelling reason for confidentiality at the moment, all such meetings should be subject to strict record keeping and those records should become automatically public after some (short) waiting period. They are in there doing the public’s business; there should be no expectation of confidentiality. The information is ours by definition and we should have it.
The duty of interpreters—and indeed anyone else present at an official meeting or a meeting of officials—should be to the public, not to confidentiality.
Indeed, they shouldn’t be allowed to close the door in the first place.
…to an interpreter, one supposes. Can’t be too careful!
But is this actually necessary? Like, has anyone tried just asking?
The same goes for anyone who worked under Trump in a similar capacity. The CIA director, various military officials (we can be certain Trump at least tried doing some stuff with the military that would be questionable at best), anyone who is in the administration of any bureaucracy where Trump thought he could weaponize such people to help him break the law. From day one, the Biden administration should have had memos going out to remind people about whistleblower protections and letting them know that if they saw something they are welcome to say something (via appropriate channels as opposed to through the media). Start by just asking. Save the subpoenas for the die hards who want to go down with him.
Then you wouldn’t have many meetings. Few foreign leaders or diplomats would agree to interact with your government under such conditions. This is veering towards Woodrow Wilson (a naive optimist) 's ‘open covenants openly arrived at’.
No public official should say anything in private during the course of their duties that they should want to keep secret from the public.
(Indeed, I seem to recall that Trump and Purim’s one in one was unprecedented. So it shouldn’t have even been a matter of no one was there to record it. That private meeting plain should not have happened.)
Leaders of governments meet with each other all the freaking time with witnesses present to put the results of the meeting in their nations’ official records. It’s the norm. Those records might not always be made public, if there was classified information in them, but the records always exist.
Until now.
Yes indeed, that is what the difference boils down to: this meeting should never have happened in this format. And it was Mike Pompeo’s fault, as he was the Secretary of State at the time and present in Helsinki, he should have made sure that Trump did not meed with Putin without witnesses. The law mandates that all the utterances of a President of the USA are recorded and archived. Pompeo, as a former Director of the CIA, should have known that and acted accordingly, for instance by threatening to resign on the spot. But he did not have the guts.
That is absurd. A trivial example: political parties meet in private to prepare meetings with other parties, for instance before a law is deliberated. They discuss tactics. Those tactics would be useless if known, so this is no non starter. Another example: Finnland and Sweden are preparing to join NATO. Turkey is imposing conditions (see → blackmail). If the discussions about this were public Putin would be the winner. Nobody wants this. It is bad enough as it is. Idealism is a fine thing, but it has limits. Common sense is one.
Quite possible – but then wouldn’t he have wanted to save the notes, to preserve for all posterity that golden moment?
Or – just a WAG – it was a different kind of “golden moment.” Not that Putin literally pissed on Trump, but he could have figuratively pissed all over Trump’s delusions of self-importance, reminding him of the many forms of leverage (financial, political and perhaps kompromat) he held over him and driving home the point that he was nothing without Putin. Those are the kind of notes Trump would want destroyed!
Secrecy might be an important factor in the moment, but there is no reason why there shouldn’t be an automatic expiration on that secrecy and have those records released to the public (depending on the situation) six months, one year, five years later. The same might be true of military actions.
I don’t believe there is anything in government that should be kept secret forever. And the vast majority of things don’t need to be kept secret for more than a year or two. Any longer than that would be an exceptional situation. There is nothing non-common sensical about this position.
Officials should expect to be held accountable. If their strategy was justified in the circumstances, they can defend themselves on that basis. If not, they should expect to answer for it. The default assumption should be that everything will eventually become public knowledge. And the staff people appurtenant to those situations should see their primary responsibility as that to the public, rather than to the confidentiality of the people involved.
Apart from reality, and the facts. And that you would unnecessarily weaken yourself and your position without need and for no real gain. And that people would circumvent that rule all the time. But I have the impression I will neither sway your naive idealism nor convince you, right? So, well, OK.
Really, all you have offered is unsupported assertions. So, nothing more real and more factual than what I have.
Yes, we are talking past each other. Never mind.
And given that, in this situation, the translators and security guards and other people involved should have no professional, ethical, legal, or moral obligation to preserve confidentiality.