Trump: Time to move forward on Russia
President tweets about joint security effort with Moscow.
President Donald Trump said Sunday that he had “strongly pressed” President Vladimir Putin about election meddling.
President Donald Trump said Sunday that he had “strongly pressed” President Vladimir Putin of Russia twice about election meddling during their first faceto-face meeting last week but did not dispute Moscow’s claim that he had accepted Putin’s denial of involvement, as he declared it “time to move forward” in a constructive U.S. relationship with Russia.
Trump’s account, in a thread of morning Twitter posts, of his lengthy and closely scrutinized closeddoor meeting with Putin was an attempt to move beyond the controversy after Moscow characterized the election discussion as a meet- ing of minds rather than a showdown between the two leaders.
Trump’s tweets, though, did little to dispel that notion. He characterized his posi-
tion as an “opinion” and asserted that he was prepared to team with Moscow — which U.S. intelligence agencies say carried out a historic effort to interfere with American democracy last year, and will attempt to again — on forming an “impenetrable Cyber Security unit” to thwart future breaches.
“I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election,” Trump said in one post.
“He vehemently denied it. I’ve already given my opinion.”
“We negotiated a cease- fire in parts of Syria which will save lives,” Trump con- tinued in another message. “Now it is time to move forward in working construc- tively with Russia!”
The posts, which drew crit- icism from both Democrats and Republicans, served as Trump’s first public com
ments on the meeting after the White House declined to schedule the customary pres
idential news conference at the end of the Group of 20 gathering in Hamburg, Germany. Trump’s meeting with Putin came on the sidelines of that event, which ended Saturday.
Putin, however, broke with his normal practice of not speaking to reporters and
held a lengthy news confer- ence, in which he said that Trump had “agreed” with his statements about election interference.
“He raised many ques- tions on the issue,” Putin said, according to Sputnik.
“I answered all these questions, as far as I could. I think that he took it into account
and agreed. Actually, you would better ask him how he found it.”
A day before, Foreign Min- ister Sergey Lavrov — the only other Russian official in the meeting, which also included Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — had said that Trump had not only accepted Putin’s denial, but also said that the election meddling alle- gations had been “exagger- ated” by some in the United States without proof.
Yet Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, on Sunday described a confrontational meeting between the two presidents and said that Trump “absolutely did not believe the denial of President Putin.”
“This was an extensive portion of the meeting,” Priebus said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Senior administration offi- cials, speaking on the condi- tion of anonymity because
they were not authorized to discuss the private meeting, have said the election interference occupied about 40 minutes of the 135-minute discussion.
In separate interviews broadcast over the week- end, Nikki Haley, the U.N. ambassador, said Putin’s description of the meeting was an attempt to obfus- cate. “This is Russia trying to save face, and they can’t,” she said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”