The gathering was a closed-door retreat hosted by the American Enterprise Institute on March 9 in Sea Island, Georgia. At the meeting, Cheney "respectfully but repeatedly" pressed Pence on concerns like President Trump taking a hard line towards NATO and deciding to withdraw troops from Syria "during the middle of a phone call".

Cheney also said to Pence, "we're getting into a situation when our friends and allies around the world that we depend upon are going to lack confidence in us," according to a Washington Post transcript.

The comments from the gathering were supposed to be "off the record", but a transcript leaked from a person who was "not authorized to share material" from the event. 

"I worry that the bottom line of that kind of an approach is we have an administration that looks a lot more like Barack Obama than Ronald Reagan," the former Vice President continued.