Trump invites Putin to White House
washington — Unbowed by swirling criticism of his summit encounter with Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump swiftly invited the Russian leader to the White House this fall for a second get-together. Putin’s ambassador to the US said Moscow is open to discussing such a meeting, even as confusion abounds over exactly what they discussed the first time.
Cleanup has continued from Monday’s two-hour private meeting in Helsinki, Finland, with Trump belatedly saying Putin’s “incredible offer” of shared US-Russia investigations was no good after all.
The Russian leader is believed to have interfered in the 2016 presidential election that sent Trump to the presidency.
Trump asked National Security Adviser John Bolton to invite Putin, and “those discussions are already underway”, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Thursday. Trump earlier had tweeted that he looked forward to “our second meeting” as he defended his performance at Monday’s summit, in which the two leaders conferred on a range of issues including terrorism, Israeli security, nuclear proliferation and North Korea.
“There are many answers, some easy and some hard, to these problems ... but they can ALL be solved!” Trump tweeted.
In Moscow, Anatoly Antonov, Russian ambassador to the US said it is important to “deal with the results” of their first summit before jumping too fast into a new one. But he said, “Russia was always open to such proposals. We are ready for discussions on this subject.” The Kremlin hasn’t responded yet to Trump’s invitation.
News of Trump’s invitation to Putin appeared to catch even the president’s top intelligence official by surprise. “Say that again,” National Intelligence Director Dan Coats responded, when informed of the invitation during an appearance at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. “OK,” he continued, pausing for a deep breath. “That’s going to be special.”
The announcement came as the White House sought to clean up days of confounding post-summit Trump statements on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump’s public doubting of Russia’s responsibility in a joint news conference with Putin on Monday provoked withering criticism from Republicans as well as Democrats and forced the president to make a rare public admission of error.
Then on Thursday, the White House said Trump “disagrees” with Putin’s offer to allow US questioning of 12 Russians who have been indicted for election interference in exchange for Russian interviews with the former US ambassador to Russia and other Americans the Kremlin accuses of unspecified crimes. Trump initially described the idea as an “incredible offer”.
The White House backtrack came just before the senate voted overwhelmingly against the proposal. It was Congress’ first formal rebuke of Trump’s actions from the summit and its aftermath.
Mixed messages from Trump have increased worries in Congress that the White House is not taking seriously the threat that officials say Russia now poses to the upcoming 2018 midterm elections.
The (Trump) administration is not going to send, force Americans to travel to Russia to be interrogated by Vladimir Putin and his team Mike Pompeo, US Secretary of State