Trump reverses course under pressure
President says he misspoke about Russia meddling
WASHINGTON — Under unrelenting pressure from congressional Republicans, his own advisers and his allies on Fox News, President Donald Trump abruptly reversed course on Tuesday and claimed he had misspoken during a news conference with President Vladimir Putin about whether Russia tried to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Trump, reading from a script, said he believed the assessment of the nation’s intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered in the campaign after seeming to have accepted Putin’s assertion the day before that Russia was not involved.
The misunderstanding, he said, grew out of an unsuccessful attempt to use a double negative when he answered a question about whether he believed Putin or his intelligence agencies.
“My people came to me,” he said in Helsinki on Monday. “They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
On Tuesday he said that he had misspoken. “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,’ sort of a double negative,” the president said. “So you can put that in and I think that probably clarifies things pretty good.”
He also insisted that he has “on numerous occasions noted our intelligence findings that Russians attempted to interfere in our elections.” He did not mention the far greater number of occasions on which he has sown doubt about whether Russia meddled.
Trump also did not retract or explain his withering attack on the FBI and the Justice Department for investigating his campaign’s ties to Russia. He did not withdraw his assertion, standing next to Putin, that the Russian leader had offered an “extremely strong and powerful” denial of involvement during their 2 1/2-hour meeting. And he did not amend his answer to a question about whether he believed Putin or officials like Dan Coats, his director of national intelligence.
Trump said there were “two thoughts” on the matter, and “I have confidence in both parties.”
It was a hastily arranged, somewhat haphazard effort to defuse a sudden political crisis that had eclipsed the president’s trip to Europe and his meeting with Putin and the leaders of NATO members and threatened to overwhelm the White House. Dozens of Republicans distanced themselves from the president’s remarks; Democrats called for hearings; and some critics even suggested his conduct, on foreign soil, rose to the level of treason.
Aides said the episode reflected how the persistent questions about Trump’s ties to Russia have all but paralyzed the president.
Baffled by his solicitous tone toward Putin, some people close to Trump have concluded that he feels vulnerable to Putin, even if it is in his own mind, rather than because of any damaging information possessed by the Russians.
Even as he walked back his remarks, Trump repeated his assertion that there was no evidence of collusion between his campaign and the Russians. That line was scribbled in black marker onto a typewritten sheet of remarks on the table before him.
At one point during his remarks, the TV lights in the Cabinet Room, where Trump was meeting with lawmakers, switched off, plunging the room into gloomy shadows. “Whoops, they just turned off the lights,” Trump joked. “That must be the intelligence agencies.”
Barely 24 hours earlier, the president had stood next to Putin under the glittering chandeliers of a ballroom in Helsinki, telling aides after the news conference wrapped up that he was happy with how it had gone.
In an interview afterward with the Fox News host, Sean Hannity, the president was upbeat, describing the meeting with Putin that preceded it as productive and speaking of a new era of cooperation with Russia.
As he flew home on Air Force One, however, Trump’s mood darkened, according to aides. He watched coverage of himself on a flat-screen television hung above the leather sofas in his office. He read briefing papers, then looked back at the TV. He snapped at aides, complaining that the coverage was “so negative.”