MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Says the White House's Concealed Putin's Admission that He Favors Trump (UPDATED)

UPDATE: Several outlets have criticized Maddow's interpretation of the errors described below. A technical glitch appears to have removed portions of the recorded conference not just from the White House transcript, but also from the transcripts used by media outlets, as Business Insider reports.

At a key point in President Donald Trump's press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki last week, a reporter asked the Russian president if he had wanted Trump to win the 2016 election. For the first time, Putin admitted that he did.

But according to the White House's official records, that didn't happen, as MSNBC's Rachel Maddow reported Tuesday night.

Other outlets have noted that in the White House's transcript of the press conference, the reporter's question about whether Putin had wanted Trump to win was suspiciously left out. And even after news outlets picked up the story, the transcript wasn't corrected.

Maddow noted that there's an even more glaring effort to conceal this central fact. In the White House's official recording of the conference, the questions itself appears to have been edited out of the video entirely.

"They just dropped it out," she said. "The first part of his question: 'President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election?' They just dropped it out."

She reports, as well, that the Russian transcripts edited out the question entirely.

But it's not clear at all why either government would go to such lengths to scrub the record of the question. Independent video and transcripts of the press conference exist, and that exchange itself was widely reported and discussed. Minor tweaks to the official records won't change that fact.

Watch the clip below: