Marina Gross, the only other American in the room during President Trump’s meeting on Monday with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, was the interpreter for Laura Bush at the Russian resort of Sochi in 2008 and interpreted for former Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson in Moscow in 2017. She appears to live in an apartment in Arlington, Va., is an employee of the State Department and is, unsurprisingly, fluent in Russian.
Little else is known publicly about Ms. Gross, who has been thrust into the spotlight as potential corroboration for what transpired between the two leaders during their two-hour meeting in Helsinki, Finland. As furor over the meeting grows, she faces increasing calls from Congress to testify about what she heard. Her fellow interpreters, who pride themselves on their discretion and invisibility, are outraged about those demands.
Ms. Gross’s white pad of notes, visible in photographs from the summit meeting, are probably useless, experienced government interpreters said, dictated in her personal shorthand that would be illegible to anyone else. And if she were to say what, exactly, transpired, she would violate an ethics code of confidentiality similar to lawyer-client privilege or the silence of a priest during confession.
Only Mr. Trump, who has alternately contradicted his own narrative of what was said and complained about a lack of fair coverage from a meeting only four people witnessed, could permit Ms. Gross to tell anyone about what she heard. The White House has not said whether Mr. Trump has asked her to do that.
