Respected again

Colombian newspaper Publimetro earlier this week released a 24-minute audio of Colombia’s Ambassador to the United States Francisco Santos and the country’s Foreign Minister-designate Claudia Blum. The paper said the pair had been recorded last week in a Washington, D.C., café by an unnamed third party.

In the animated and muddy recording, Santos — the country’s former vice president and a longtime diplomat — offers Blum advice about navigating the Washington power structure.

[...]

Santos said that a decade ago, when he visited Washington, “it was predictable. You knew how things worked. Now that’s all over.” As an example, Santos said that the ambassador from Singapore to the U.S. had confided that during the Obama administration he used to visit the State Department once a week, but now hadn’t been there in eight months “because it doesn’t count.” While he said that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo still carried weight in Washington, his underlings had no power, and that real policy decisions were being made by the National Security Council.

  Miami Herald

He's not wrong about that.

And I would like to point out the obvious: In this same fashion, Trump's Mar-A-Lago dining area national security conversation with Japan's prime minister and Sondland's restaurant call to Trump should be simply understood as publicly available - all over the world. Were they this ignorant or did they just not care?

Santos also worried that Washington might lose interest in the Venezuela issue. As he has for the last several months, Santos said he plans to keep leading delegations of U.S. lawmakers to the Colombian-Venezuelan border, so they can see the crisis first hand.

“We’re going to do that [so] Washington doesn’t forget how important Venezuela is,” Santos said. U.S. lawmakers “need to understand that that sh**show is going to destabilize the entire continent. Here [in Washington] there is no memory, within 10 minutes they’re bored and on to the next issue. I have to keep inventing things so that they will keep Venezuela top of mind. That’s my job when it comes to the Venezuela issue.”