- On Friday, Sabrina Siddiqui, a White House correspondent with The Wall Street Journal, and Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci were summoned to a private meeting in White House communications director Kate Bedingfield’s office.
- There, they were let in on a huge secret: President Joe Biden — who was scheduled to depart for Poland at 7 p.m. for the anniversary of the start of the Russia-Ukraine war — would be sneaking into Kyiv.
- The two journalists would be the only members of the press tagging along, according to a pool report from Siddiqui on Monday that detailed how the whole secret trip went down.
- Biden was last seen going out to dinner on Saturday night for a Valentine’s week meal with his wife Jill, enjoying a plate of rigatoni with fennel sausage ragu. Of course, now we know that Biden slipped out of the White House in the middle of the night and popped up 20 hours later in downtown Kyiv, Ukraine. But how the trip — one of many secret trips to warzones by presidents — came about is fascinating.
