‘Hilarious’: White House Mocks NPR Over Alaska Summit ‘Security Breach’ Story

The White House on Saturday dismissed and mocked a report by National Public Radio (NPR) that claimed US government documents containing sensitive and secretive details about President Trump’s summit with Russian President Putin were found in an Alaskan hotel.

The NPR story began, “Papers with U.S. State Department markings, found Friday morning in the business center of an Alaskan hotel, revealed previously undisclosed and potentially sensitive details about the Aug. 15 meetings between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in Anchorage.”

It continued, “Eight pages, that appear to have been produced by U.S. staff and left behind accidentally, shared precise locations and meeting times of the summit and phone numbers of U.S. government employee.”

But White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly has rejected that there’s anything relevant here, going so far as to call out NPR for exaggerating its significance. She characterized the documents as nothing more than a “multi-page lunch menu” and blasted NPR for sensationalizing the discovery.

“It’s hilarious that NPR is publishing a multi-page lunch menu and calling it a ‘security breach,’” Kelly told ABC News. She said:

“This kind of so-called ‘investigative journalism’ is exactly why people don’t take them seriously anymore – and why they’re no longer taxpayer-funded thanks to President Trump.”

NPR in its report observed that the documents went so far as to provide phonetic guides for Russian names, such as “Mr. President POO-tihn.”

The report further cited ‘experts’ who alleged this shows carelessness and lack of proper security protocols in handling sensitive documents involving top level meetings with the US president and world leaders.

A lunch menu and scheduling… pundits are framing this as some major scandal and breach…

Interesting timetable and lunch menu. #AlaskaFiasco
Government papers found in an Alaskan hotel reveal new details of Trump-Putin summit https://t.co/UDnCXJXcid pic.twitter.com/OwFSV8bpKj

— @RGBAtlantica (@RGBAtlantica) August 16, 2025

Still, the NPR story didn’t make much of a splash, given the avalanche of other, much more important headlines which came out of the ‘constructive’ Alaska summit.

The mainstream US press has tended to present the historic summit with a perspective that Trump is somehow being ‘compromised’ by Russia’s Putin – though there’s zero evidence that this is the case.