Trump invites Putin to visit U.S.
Overture for the fall comes amid summit fallout
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump unexpectedly invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to visit Washington this fall, the White House announced Thursday, just after he belatedly rejected Putin’s request to interrogate a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow and other Americans.
The invitation came three days after Trump’s much- criticized summit with Putin in Helsinki, and as Trump’s director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, was describing in an interview televised live on the major cable news networks the “undeniable” threat of Russian cyberattacks and his fear of a “cyber 9/11.”
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said “discussions are underway” with Russia about a summit in Washington. The political risks of a visit from Putin, amid a special counsel’s investigation of his government’s interference in the 2016 election and just ahead of elections for Congress, were underscored by Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii: “Late October would be great for us,” he tweeted.
The developments came as Trump tried for a third consecutive day to answer critics of his Helsinki performance by taking a tougher line with Putin than he did when they met. The president’s decision not to allow Russia to interrogate Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, and some other Americans, as Putin had proposed during their summit, came after a bipartisan President Donald Trump invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to Washington three days after the Helsinki summit. firestorm that he was even considering the idea.
“It is a proposal that was made in sincerity by President Putin, but President Trump disagrees with it,” Sanders said in a statement.
Putin had floated the idea of the interrogations as part of a swap: He would allow 12 Russian operatives indicted last week in the special counsel’s investigation of Moscow’s election interference to be questioned, but by Russian officials with U.S. investigators present — and only if the U.S. gave Russia access to a dozen Americans it accuses of crimes, including McFaul, the ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama.
Trump, as he stood beside Putin at their summit, had labeled the Russian leader’s proposal an “incredible offer.”
On Wednesday, Sanders confirmed that the president was considering the idea, provoking broad outrage across Washington.
Yet the State Department on Wednesday dismissed Russia’s allegations against McFaul and the others as “absurd.” Republicans as well as Democrats objected that Trump hadn’t immediately rejected Putin’s request, signaling that agreeing to such a proposal could be a red line for Congress.
That decision came just after Trump met at the White House with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who had strongly opposed allowing Russia access to the Americans, telling the Christian Broadcasting Network on Thursday, “that’s not going to happen.”
Even after the announcement, in a rebuke of the president, the Republicancontrolled Senate voted 98-0 for a nonbinding resolution opposing the “making available of current and former diplomats, officials, and members of the Armed Forces of the United States for questioning by the government of Vladimir Putin.”
The dispute between Trump and Putin over the issue came as the leaders otherwise offered remarkably similar takes on their summit, both portraying it as a success and attacking American media and Trump adversaries as standing in the way of U.S.-Russia cooperation.
Early Thursday, Trump tweeted that the summit “was a great success, except with the real enemy of the people, the Fake News Media.”
Trump said that the media “are pushing so recklessly hard and hate the fact that I’ll probably have a good relationship with Putin.” He went so far as to say that the media badly wants “a confrontation that could lead to war.”
Putin, in his first public comments about the summit, told Russian diplomats Thursday that relations with the United States had been “in some ways worse than during the Cold War” but his meeting with Trump put the two nations on “the path to positive change.”
However, there are “forces in the United States that are ready to sacrifice Russian-American relations for their ambitions in the domestic political struggle,” Putin added.
Both leaders have said that their private, two-hour conversation yielded agreements in various policy areas, though by Thursday, the White House and State and Defense departments had been unable to provide details, with many officials professing to be in the dark themselves.
Even Coats acknowledged that he doesn’t know what took place between the presidents, and said he opposed their meeting alone.
“That is the president’s prerogative,” Coats said in his televised interview Thursday. “If he had asked me how that ought to be conducted, I would have suggested a different way.”
Asked if Putin might have recorded the meeting, he said, “That risk is always there.”
During Coats’ interview with NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, she broke the news to him of Trump’s invitation to Putin.
Coats showed his surprise and said, “OK. That’s going to be special.”
Before the news of the Putin invitation, Trump wrote in two Twitter messages Thursday that he looks forward “to our second meeting so that we can start implementing some of the many things discussed.”
He listed stopping terrorism, security for Israel, nuclear proliferation, cyberattacks, trade, Ukraine, Middle East peace and North Korea. “They can ALL be solved!” he wrote.
Neither country has offered any specifics about particular agreements or future plans for bilateral collaboration. Some congressional Democrats have suggested subpoenaing the American translator — only the presidents’ respective interpreters were in the room for their initial meeting — to solve the mystery.