Republican front-runner Donald Trump claimed during Tuesday’s GOP debate that he met Vladimir Putin during a taping of “60 Minutes,” and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina claimed she also met the Russian president, but “not in a green room for a show.”
However, Trump didn’t actually meet Putin during the taping of a recent “60 Minutes” interview, and despite her claim Tuesday night, Fiorina appears to have met the Russian President in a “green room-type setting.”
Trump’s claim that he had met Putin during a “60 Minutes” interview came Tuesday evening as he assured the Fox Business moderators that he is best suited to handle the Russian president because he has a personal relationship with him.
“We were stablemates on ’60 Minutes’ and that went pretty well,” the real estate mogul said, explaining that they first met while sitting in the same green room.
The problem for Trump is that there was no green room meeting. Putin was interviewed for the aforementioned “60 Minutes” segment from Russia, while Trump was interviewed from the United States.
“Just before his trip to the U.S., Putin invited us to meet him at his state residence outside Moscow where we found him characteristically confident and combative as he made the case that the focus in Syria should be fighting [the Islamic State] rather than removing Syrian President Assad,” CBS News Sept. 17 news segment, which was filmed outside of Moscow.
Later in the debate, former Hewlett-Packard CEO took a sly dig at Trump’s bragging.
“You know Mr. Trump fancies himself a very good negotiator, and I accept that he’s done a lot of good deals. So Mr. Trump ought to know that we should not speak to people from a position of weakness,” Fiorina said. “One of the reasons I have said that I would not be talking to Vladimir Putin right now, although I have met him as well, not in a green room for a show, but in a private meeting.”
Oddly enough, and unlike Trump, Fiorina appears to have indeed met Putin in a green room, TV show-style setting, according to the Daily Beast.
“Fiorina met Putin for 45 minutes in a green room-type setting, during the 2001 APEC CEO Summit in Beijing, where they were both scheduled to deliver speeches,” the report reads. “Fiorina, at the time the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, was slated to speak before Putin — and when addressing the audience she was effusive about how Putin had led a change more dramatic than anything her own company had accomplished.”
Fiorina herself said during an appearance in September on the “The Tonight Show” that she met Putin in a “green room setting.”
“I met him in Beijing. We were in sort of a green room setting, actually,” Fiorina said. “The two of us were giving a speech … each of us were giving a speech at a major economic conference called APEC … and so the two of us were sitting sort of in a chair like this, about this close, for 45 minutes before his speech and before mine. I would describe him as a formidable adversary.”
So the roles were flipped Tuesday night: Fiorina actually met Putin in a “green room-type setting,” though she suggested she hadn’t, and Trump did not, though he maintained he had.
