Trump: ‘I made Syria truce deal with Putin’

US President defends his relationship with Russian leader after calling son’s treatment a ‘witch hunt’

Donald Trump has used his first television interview in two months to defend his relationship with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and declare that the current ceasefire in Syria only came about because the two of them struck a deal. The President also said his son, Donald Trump Jr, had faced the “greatest witch hunt in political history” over his links with Russia.

DONALD TRUMP has used his first television interview in two months to defend his relationship with President Vladimir Putin and argue that the Syria ceasefire was because “President Putin and President Trump made a deal”.

Mr Trump, whose White House is reeling from an admission by his son, Donald Trump Jr, that he had sought damaging information on Hillary Clinton from a “Russian government attorney”, did not address his son’s meeting in last night’s interview, although he did later confirm to Reuters that he was unaware of it until a couple of days ago.

In his first non-fox News interview in more than two months, Mr Trump told the Christian Broadcasting Network that his own blossoming friendship with Russia’s leader was in America’s best interests.

“People said, ‘Oh, they shouldn’t get along...well, who are the people that are saying that? I think we get along very, very well.”

The president told Pat Robertson, an evangelical Christian who founded the network, that Mr Putin would have preferred Mrs Clinton as president, because he was building up the military and she would have weakened it.

“We are the most powerful country in the world and we are getting more and more powerful because I’m a big military person,” he said.

“As an example, if Hillary had won, our military would be decimated. Our energy would be much more expensive. That’s what Putin doesn’t like about me. And that’s why I say, why would he want me? Because from day one I wanted a strong military, he doesn’t want to see that.”

The president also said Syria’s current ceasefire was down to their talks. “One thing we did is we had a ceasefire in a major part of Syria where there was tremendous bedlam and tremendous killing,” he said. “The ceasefire has held for four days. Those previous ceasefires haven’t held at all.

“That’s because President Putin and President Trump made the deal, and it’s held.”

He later also told Reuters he twice asked Mr Putin if Russia had meddled in last year’s US presidential election. Mr Trump said he spent the first 20 or 25 minutes of their meeting at the G20 in Hamburg last week on the subject.

“I said, did you do it? And he said ‘no, I did not. Absolutely not’. I then asked him a second time in a totally different way. He said ‘absolutely not’.”

Earlier yesterday the president had spoken out in defence of his embattled son, now embroiled in the messy Russian saga. Mr Trump declared him “innocent” and a victim of the “greatest witch hunt in political history” as he sought to counter the gravest crisis to face his administration so far.

It marked an aggressive change of strategy as the White House sought to defend allegations by Democrats that Mr Trump Jr broke election laws.

Jay Sekulow, the president’s lawyer, said: “The meeting that took place is not illegal. The President was not at the meeting, was not aware of the meeting, did not participate in the meeting.”

The meeting took place on June 9, 2016 with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who has denied links to the Kremlin. It was brokered by Rob Goldstone, a British-born music publicist, who suggested there would be “incriminating” and “ultra sensitive” information about Mrs Clinton on offer.

Mr Trump Jr told Fox News the meeting “really went nowhere” and he never told his father about it because there was “nothing to tell”.

Meanwhile, Christopher Wray, Mr Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI, told a US Senate confirmation hearing yesterday that he did not consider investigations to be a “witch hunt”.