Overview

• Three guests at Anchorage’s Hotel Captain Cook found eight pages of State Department materials in a public printer roughly two hours before the Trump-Putin summit.
• The packet, produced by the Office of the Chief of Protocol, included meeting schedules, room assignments, contact numbers, a seating chart, luncheon menu and a planned gift for President Putin.
• NPR’s publication of images on August 16 spurred widespread media coverage and prompted both White House and State Department spokespeople to label the incident a non-security breach.
• National-security experts and critics, citing a previous ‘Signalgate’ episode, warned that leaving operational documents in public printers creates vulnerabilities and signals ongoing administrative sloppiness.
• No formal determination of a security breach has been announced, and no individual has been publicly identified as responsible for the misplaced documents.