NBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Trump-Putin Summit: ‘Very Clear to Me That Vladimir Putin Has the Upper Hand’

Monday on NBC’s “Today,” network chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell declared Russian President Vladimir Putin has the “upper hand” in his meeting with Donald Trump.

Mitchell claimed the United States president “handed Putin a propaganda victory” by praising him and then turning around and slamming the two countries’ poor relationship on Twitter.

“It’s very clear to me that Vladimir Putin has the upper hand just from the optics of it and the fact that the president went in praising him, saying how important better relations were,” Mitchell stated. “No one would argue about that, but he had just, on Twitter, blamed the worsening relationship … on past stupidity, he said, by prior administrations and what he called the ‘rigged witch-hunt.’”

“[H]e has already handed Putin a propaganda victory,” she added.

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