In February 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris attended an annual security conference in Germany to talk with European leaders about Russian aggression toward Ukraine and other world topics. She didn’t go to Russia, and there is no evidence she met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, contrary to an unsupported claim made by former President Donald Trump.
Trump has baselessly claimed at least twice in recent days that Harris had a meeting with Putin just days before Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
“Remember when [President Joe] Biden sent Kamala to Europe to stop the war in Ukraine,” Trump said at a North Carolina campaign rally on Aug. 21. “She met with Putin to tell him, ‘Don’t do it.’ And three days later, he attacked. That’s when the attack started.”
The next day, during an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Trump repeated the claim and took it a step further, falsely claiming Harris had been sent to Russia.
He said: “But let me tell you — and a little known fact that the press doesn’t want to talk about, Biden sent — I call her comrade Kamala — sent comrade Kamala to see Putin in Russia three days before the attack. She went. She said — she gave her case. He attacked three days later. He attacked three days later. He laughed at her. He thought she was a joke.”
But it’s not a fact, and there is no reason for the press to talk about it because there is no indication a meeting happened. There’s nothing about such a meeting — let alone a trip to Russia — in the press pool reports, which were filed daily by one of the reporters traveling with Harris. The idea that the press would ignore such a high-level meeting is absurd.
Harris traveled to Germany on Feb. 17, 2022, to attend the annual Munich Security Conference, which lasted from Feb. 18 to Feb. 20. She gave a speech on Feb. 19, in which she warned that the U.S. and its allies would “impose significant and unprecedented economic costs” if Russia attacked Ukraine. She also was scheduled to have in-person meetings with several heads of state, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the leaders of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, according to a background press call about her trip.
But senior Biden administration officials on the Feb. 16 call did not mention Putin, and prior to her trip, Reuters reported that there were no plans for Harris to meet with anyone from Russia or China. Russia did not even send a representative to the conference that year.
In fact, in July, a Putin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, when asked whether Putin had ever talked with Harris, told reporters, “To be honest, I can’t remember a single contact between President Putin and Ms. Harris.”
At the time of the Munich conference, U.S. officials had been warning for a few months that Russia planned an invasion, while Russia repeatedly denied it. On Feb. 18, 2022, Biden said in a press conference, “We have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning to and intend to attack Ukraine in the coming week — in the coming days.”
At the end of Trump’s Aug. 22 interview on Fox News, one of the hosts of “Fox & Friends” did some impromptu fact-checking.
“Just as a quick clarification, we don’t have confirmation that the vice president went to Russia to meet with Vladimir Putin,” said co-host Brian Kilmeade, who noted that Harris did otherwise travel to Europe days before Russia attacked Ukraine.
We contacted Trump’s presidential campaign to ask for the evidence to support his claim, but we have not received a response.
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