Summit briefing materials are found on a public hotel printer; the press secretary calls it a lunch menu.

OK. Sit down. I have stories.

So Friday morning, three guests at the Hotel Captain Cook in Anchorage walk over to the public business center to print out their boarding passes. Boarding passes. Like normal people. They get to the printer, and there are eight pages already sitting there in the tray. Eight pages they did not print. Eight pages in the out tray. So they look at them, like you do, because you are at a hotel and somebody left their stuff on the printer.

The first page is the schedule for the Trump–Putin summit. Page one. Sequence of meetings. Room names inside Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson. The military base. Where the leader of the Russian Federation is showing up in two hours. Where in the building each conversation will happen.

Pages two through five. Names of the U.S. and Russian state leaders. Phone numbers of three American staff members. A note on the planned ceremonial gift to Putin. Lunch course details — green salad, filet mignon, halibut olympia, crème brûlée. A whole packet.

Then on Saturday, the deputy press secretary at the White House gets asked about it and says, listen to me very carefully, this is a quote, the whole thing was “hilarious” and the documents in question were “a multi-page lunch menu.”

Buddy. A multi-page lunch menu. Nobody has ever printed an eight-page lunch menu in the history of buffet. Olive Garden does not print an eight-page lunch menu. The Cheesecake Factory has a bound book and even that is six pages. The first page of the document is the schedule of bilateral meetings on a military base. That is not lunch. That is operations.

I have run a casino floor. We had what we called the OpSec rule. The OpSec rule is: you do not leave the count on the printer. You do not leave the count on the printer in the public business center. You do not leave the count on the printer in the public business center of the hotel where the high-rollers are sleeping the night before. This is the first day of training.

And the response from the press shop is “hilarious.”

I’m arguing with the television. I’m arguing with the television at full volume. The television is winning because it’s stunned.