The lack of an official record for one of President Trump's foreign policy meetings apparently created a whole lot of confusion among those in the administration.
The Washington Post reports that after Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2018, Bolton told administration officials that during the "no-notes" meeting, the president had "insisted that U.S. troops would stay in Syria until Moscow forced out its Iranian allies." So officials at the Pentagon and the State Department began to work out a strategy with this as the goal since they had "no reason to doubt Bolton's account."
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