NSA HR McMaster defends Trump’s firing of FBI chief

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump raised the firing of his FBI director in a meeting with Russia’s foreign minister to explain why he had been unable to find areas of cooperation with Moscow, the White House national security adviser said on Sunday.

“The gist of the conversation was that the president feels as if he is hamstrung in his ability to work with Russia to find areas of cooperation because this has been obviously so much in the news,” HR McMaster said in an interview on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

Reports that Trump boasted to Russian officials of firing former FBI director James Comey to relieve “great pressure” from a law-enforcement probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election engulfed his administration in turmoil just as Trump left for his first foreign trip as president on Friday.

“I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Trump said during a May 10 meeting with Russian officials, according to a report by The New York Times that cited a document summarising the meeting and an unnamed US official.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov denied that Comey had come up during the meeting, according to Interfax news agency.

IN ISRAEL, TRUMP SEEKS ‘ULTIMATE DEAL’

President Trump has cast the elusive pursuit of peace between Israelis and Palestinians as the “ultimate deal.” But he will step foot in Israel having offered few indications of how he plans to achieve what so many of his predecessors could not.

Trump has handed son-inlaw Jared Kushner and longtime business lawyer Jason Greenblatt the assignment of charting the course toward a peace process.

Kushner and Greenblatt were to accompany Trump on his two-day visit starting Monday that include separate meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Trump also planned to visit the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem and the Western Wall, an important key Jewish holy site.