It’s not exactly the Pentagon Papers, or even the disappointing declassified report denying any American communications with alien life, but this week’s “menu-gate” contained all the salacious details that Miss Manners would have loved.
National Public Radio, which is losing $1.1 billion in taxpayer funds at President Trump’s insistence, on Saturday published details surrounding the president’s high-level meeting with Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardons on Friday. The documents had apparently been left on a printer at the four-star Captain Cook hotel near the base by someone from the Office of the Chief of Protocol, which is responsible for presidential travel and meetings with foreign dignitaries.
Retrieved by a hotel guest two hours before the summit and handed over to the public radio network, which protected the identity of the leaker, the papers contained all the intrigue to be expected of an event planner.
A three-course menu, a pronunciation guide for the names of the well-known figures in attendance along with pictures of them, luncheon seating charts, even the customary gift given to heads of state. The inside look at how to produce a lunch meeting contained the phone numbers — redacted for publication — of three unknown staff members. All were revealed by the abandoned documents.
A big oops indeed. NPR quoted a UCLA professor who called it sloppy and incompetent, but even NPR did not describe the incident as anything more than “a lapse in professional judgement.” The report was met with mockery from the White House.
“It’s hilarious that NPR is publishing a multi-page lunch menu and calling it a ‘security breach,’” White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement to NewsNation and picked up by The Hill. “This type of self-proclaimed ‘investigative journalism’ is why no one takes them seriously and they are no longer taxpayer-funded thanks to President Trump.”
The mistake is not the first by this administration — one high-level classified communique on Signal earlier this year accidentally included a journalist. It is also unlikely to be the last. But the disclosure served as tasty fodder reinforcing political and culinary perspectives, and prompted a New York Times review of the menu’s centerpiece, Halibut Olympia.
“It has the vibe of being homey and comforting and mildly retro, but palatable,” Edible Alaska magazine editor Jeremy Pataky told the newspaper. “I would not characterize it as haute cuisine. To see that on the menu for an extremely high-level state dinner felt a bit surprising.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
