Second Trump-Putin summit put off

US President Donald Trump will postpone a second meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin until next year after the federal investigation into Russian election meddling is over, national security adviser John Bolton said on Wednesday.

“The President believes that the next bilateral meeting with President Putin should take place after the Russia witch hunt is over, so we’ve agreed that it will be after the first of the year,” Bolton told reporters.

US intelligence agencies have concluded that Moscow interfered to sway the vote toward Trump, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating whether Trump’s campaign worked with the Russians.

Special counsel Robert Mueller hasn’t given any public indication of when he will complete his investigation into allegations of improper ties between Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian government.

The White House had earlier said that Trump would meet with Putin at the White House in the fall.

The invitation sparked an outcry, including from lawmakers in Trump’s Republican party, who argued that Putin is an adversary not worthy of a White House visit and that they still didn’t know what the leaders had discussed during their two-hour, one-on-one

Yuri Ushakov,

aide to Vladimir Putin meeting in Helsinki.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said he would not invite Putin to speak before Congress during the Washington visit. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel said Tuesday that Putin “will not be welcome” in the capitol.

Trump rejected the criticism sparked by his Helsinki news conference with Putin and said he misspoke in a series of flip-flops over the summit. He then abruptly issued the invitation to Putin.

The Kremlin said this week that although Washington and Moscow agreed there was a need for another Putin-Trump meeting, Russia had not yet begun any practical preparations for a new meeting.

“There are other options (to meet) which our leaders can look at,” aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters, citing a meeting of G20 leaders in Argentina which starts at the end of November.

Trump has repeatedly called Mueller’s probe into meddling in the 2016 election a “witch hunt,” a claim that he repeated in a tweet the same day he met with Putin in Helsinki.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday vigorously defended President Donald Trump’s foreign policy actions as senators from both parties denounced Trump’s behavior, particularly at his recent summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Pompeo faced tough questioning from Democrats and Republicans during testimony before the Senator Foreign Relations Committee about Trump’s failure to hold the Russian president accountable for Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 US election at their meeting in Helsinki last week.

“I have tremendous faith in you, I think you’re a patriot ... but it’s the president’s actions that create tremendous distrust in our nation,” the committee’s Republican chairman, Bob Corker, told Pompeo.

Pompeo said he had been comprehensively briefed on Trump’s one-on-one meeting with Putin, who US intelligence agencies said knew about Russia’s meddling in the election.

Putin has said no such interference occurred.

There are other options (to meet) which our leaders can look at.”