The following article by Mark Landler was posted on the New York Times website May 11, 2017:
WASHINGTON — What is it about Sergey V. Lavrov that always makes high-ranking American officials look hapless?
In 2006, Mr. Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, put Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in an awkward position when technicians did not turn off the microphones at a lunch in Moscow. Reporters overheard the two of them bickering over American policy in Iraq. “What does that mean?” she said at one point. “I think you understand,” he replied.
Three years later, Hillary Clinton commemorated her first meeting with Mr. Lavrov after she became secretary of state by presenting him with a gag gift, a bright red button, stamped with what she said was the Russian word for “reset.” “You got it wrong,” he scolded, pointing to the faulty translation as cameras flashed. “It means overcharged.”
On Wednesday, he put Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson in a bad spot after a reporter asked if President Trump’s dismissal of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, hours earlier would “cast a shadow” over their meeting. Mr. Tillerson turned away without answering, but Mr. Lavrov wisecracked: “Was he fired? You’re kidding! You’re kidding!”
Later, at the White House, Mr. Lavrov met President Trump for what was supposed to be a private meeting, with no reporters or cameras allowed into the Oval Office, save for official photographers from each government. Afterward, the Russian state news agency, Tass, published pictures of Mr. Trump and Mr. Lavrov grinning broadly, alongside the Russian ambassador to Washington, Sergey I. Kislyak.
White House officials were furious, saying their Russian counterparts had tricked them. The point of barring the news media, a senior official said, was to prevent the publication of images of a meeting that was, at a minimum, badly timed, given that Mr. Trump had just fired the director of the agency investigating his campaign’s ties to Russia.
The Russian government owns Tass, so a photographer working for the agency could arguably be considered an official photographer. But White House officials said the understanding was that the photos would be for official use, not for public distribution.
Mr. Kislyak’s participation added another sensitive element: It was his meetings before the inauguration with two of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers, Michael T. Flynn and Jeff Sessions, that led to Mr. Flynn’s dismissal as national security adviser and forced Mr. Sessions, the attorney general, to recuse himself from the investigation of Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia and of Russian meddling in the presidential election.
Now, the White House is under fire for excluding the American news media, but not its Russia competitors, from a high-level meeting. Some experts have even called it a security breach, suggesting that the photographer could have smuggled a bug into the Oval Office in his camera equipment.
“I’m actually a bit shocked that that happened,” Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, said on CNN. “The lack of transparency of having the press in that meeting is troubling.”
The White House defended its original arrangement with the Russian Foreign Ministry. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary, said it was not unusual to forgo the practice of allowing the press into a meeting when the president was not seeing another head of state. “Proper protocol was followed in this procedure,” she said.
She did not address whether the Russians had been deceitful. But another official said the episode did not bode well for American-Russian relations. And two former Obama officials suggested on Twitter that it posed a security risk. “Deadly serious Q: Was it a good idea to let a Russian gov photographer & all their equipment into the Oval Office?” said Colin H. Kahl, who was national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “No, it was not,” replied David S. Cohen, a former deputy director of the C.I.A.
Michael A. McFaul, a former ambassador to Russia, recalled arranging President Barack Obama’s first meeting with Mr. Lavrov in May 2009, which included a traditional “pool spray” for the White House press corps. “They created this problem themselves by not letting everyone in,” he said.
The episode even came up on Thursday in a Senate hearing on threats to American national security. Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine, asked Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, whether his agency had been consulted “in terms of the risk of some kind of cyberpenetration or communications in that incident.”
Admiral Rogers said he had not, adding, “I’ll be honest, I wasn’t aware of where the images came from.”
White House officials noted that foreign photographers, including those from state-owned news agencies, are routinely admitted into the Oval Office for meetings with the president and foreign leaders. Their equipment is scanned and searched by the Secret Service, and the Oval Office is regularly swept for eavesdropping devices.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump posted a picture on Twitter of himself and Mr. Lavrov. He also posted a photo of himself with Ukraine’s foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin, whom he met the same day as Mr. Lavrov — a session, that, if the White House had done more to promote it, might have mitigated the optics of the Russia meeting.
While Mr. Trump noted in a separate post that the Russians “must be laughing up their sleeves” at America, he said it was because of the furor over Mr. Comey’s ouster, which he characterized as a “Democrat EXCUSE for losing the election.”