Did the White House delete a key question from Trump's press conference with Putin?

It's been more than a week since Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin held a joint press conference in Helsinki, Finland, but new areas of concern keep on springing up.

On Tuesday night, for instance, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow called attention to the fact that it appears the official White House video of the event omits one key question from Reuters reporter Jeff Mason, to which Putin gave a controversial response.

During the press conference, Mason asked Putin, "Did you want President Trump to win the election and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?"

And Putin replied: "Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal."

But the first part of Mason's question — the part about wanting Trump to win — is not included in the White House's footage of the event.

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In the White House video, Mason is simply heard asking, "And did you direct any of your officials to help him do that," followed by Putin's response.

The Atlantic reported the significant omission last week, adding that the official White House transcript of the exchange didn't include Mason's full question either.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Though it remains unclear if the omission was done intentionally or was simply an oversight, Maddow thinks the people at the White House know exactly what they've done.

"The U.S. government is essentially following the Kremlin’s playbook and maintaining that something we all saw happen with our own eyes, we all heard happen with our own ears, has nevertheless disappeared ― like old political opponents being airbrushed out of photos," Maddow said. "It’s weird, right? It’s creepy."

And Mason, the reporter who asked the question, also feels the omission could be extremely misleading.

"You could interpret that to mean he’s answering ‘yes’ to both," Mason told The Atlantic, but "looking at it critically, he spent a good chunk of that press conference, just like President Trump did, denying any collusion. So I think it’s likely that when he said ‘Yes, I did,’ that he was just responding to the first part of my question and perhaps didn’t hear the second part."

If that's the case, it's easy to assume the White House omitted the first part of the question so as not to make it seem like Putin wanted Trump to win, which would be further motive for election interference.

And in case things weren't confusing enough, the transcript on the Russian president's website omitted the exchange in question in its entirely.

The Washington Post, however, notes that even its own transcript of the event omits part of the question, so the act might not have been intentional.

"Ours came from Bloomberg Government and ours, too, excludes the first part of the reporters question in which he begins, 'President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election,'" The Washington Post's Philip Bump writes.

The publication also reviewed video feeds from the conference and noticed a clear switch between the audio feed from reporters to translators.

A White House official also told CNN’s Abby Phillip that its transcript "did not have Mason's audio turned up in time," which explains the mishap.

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Despite Maddow's impassioned argument, it sounds like technical difficulties might be to blame for this unfortunate omission.