Papers detailing President Donald Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, including meeting rooms, seating arrangements and the menu for a lunch that was canceled were discovered on the printer at a hotel in Anchorage where the two leaders met, according to several Saturday media reports.
The eight pages, prepared by U.S. staff and left behind in the business center at Hotel Captain Cook, bore U.S. State Department markings and were later found by three guests who declined to be identified, NPR reported.
The papers included precise meeting times and locations for the Friday summit inside Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, as well as phone numbers for American government employees, according to the reports. Three hotel guests found the documents around 9 a.m. and took photos later reviewed by NPR.
The first page outlined the sequence of meetings, including the specific rooms where they were to take place, and noted Trump’s plan to present Putin with an “American Bald Eagle Desk Statue.”
White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly on Saturday dismissed the documents as a “multi-page lunch menu” and said their discovery did not constitute a security breach. The State Department declined to comment.
Other pages contained the names and phone numbers of three U.S. staff members, as well as 13 U.S. and Russian officials, along with phonetic guides for Russian names.
The documents also described a luncheon “in honor of his excellency Vladimir Putin,” thought he lunch was ultimately canceled. The papers included a seating chart that placed Putin across from Trump, who was to be flanked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on one side; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Special Envoy for Peace Missions Steve Witkoff were seated on the other.
Putin was to sit alongside Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov. The menu called for a green salad, filet mignon and halibut olympia, with crème brûlée for dessert.
Jon Michaels, a UCLA law professor who specializes in national security, told NPR the discovery illustrated a lapse in judgment by administration officials.
“It strikes me as further evidence of the sloppiness and incompetence of the administration,” Michaels said. “You just don’t leave things in printers. It’s that simple.”
Earlier in the week, a law enforcement group chat that included members of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement mistakenly added a random participant to a discussion of an ongoing manhunt. In March, national security officials inadvertently included a journalist in a group chat about pending military strikes in Yemen.
