If President Joe Biden has any private words with Russia’s Vladimir Putin at their meeting next week, U.S. interpreters and diplomats will be standing by to document their high-stakes encounter. It’s a decades-old system meant to ensure that senior officials, and ultimately history, have a record of what American presidents say to international leaders. And it’s one that held up — mostly — even under former President Donald Trump, including when he confiscated the notes taken by his American interpreter at a private meeting with Putin in 2017. A former official familiar with the matter told The Associated Press of the swift steps Americans took to preserve records of Trump’s talks with Putin.
