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Mike McCormick, who worked as a White House stenographer for 15 years and with Biden from 2011 to 2017, told the Washington Free Beacon in an interview
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During Biden’s first visit with then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in March 2011, McCormick said the former KGB leader "publicly humiliated" the vice president by cutting off his microphone during their press conference—an incident that McCormick said never made it into media coverage of the trip.
Biden’s staffers at the time "made a big deal about how Putin really dominated the conversation [with] Obama" in a prior meeting, said McCormick. They indicated that Biden, with his decades of Senate foreign policy experience, wasn’t going to let Putin get the upper hand.
But during the public portion of the meeting in Moscow—as Biden launched into a soliloquy about his visits to Russia during the Cold War—his microphone was abruptly cut off mid-sentence, the press lighting was switched off, and Putin’s aides ushered the media out of the room, said McCormick.
"[Putin’s] message was unmistakable: I’m in charge of the room, I’m in charge of my country, and I’m in charge of the reset," wrote McCormick in his book. "As you might imagine, the vice president’s staffers were furious with the Russians. I was instructed to have the transcript reflect how the vice president had been cut off in mid sentence."
The official White House transcript of the meeting includes the sudden ending: "VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: There’s a reason, Mr. Prime Minister. Mr. Prime Minister, I’ve been around a long time. The first time I was here—the second time I was here, I was meeting with President Brezhnev. We were trying to pass SALT II—END"
"He basically got body slammed by Putin, really. I mean, I don’t know how else to describe it," McCormick told the Free Beacon. "To me it was like, here’s our great foreign policy expert and he just got punk’d. And Vladimir Putin just had no fear or respect for him."
