‘Maybe’ let Putin grill Americans

President Trump is considering a request from Vladimir Putin to interrogate former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul and anti-Kremlin financier Bill Browder, the White House acknowledged Wednesday — a request the State Department called “absurd.”

As Trump continued to face backlash over his softball press conference with Putin, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders shared bits of what the two leaders discussed during their private sit-down in Helsinki, Finland on Monday.

She said Putin offered Trump a deal in which the Kremlin would be allowed to question McFaul and Browder in exchange for letting special counsel Robert Mueller interrogate the 12 Russian intelligence officers indicted last week for hacking into Democratic Party computer servers.

“(Trump) wants to work with his team and determine if there’s any validity that would be helpful to the process,” Sanders told reporters.

Sanders said the administration had “committed to nothing.”

“It was an idea they threw out,” she added.

Nonetheless, longtime diplomats — and even Trump’s own State Department — found Putin’s request outrageous and said it must be swiftly rejected.

“We do not stand by those assertions,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said, blasting Putin’s request.

McFaul, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, called Putin’s proposal “ridiculous” and called on the White House to backpedal.

“Not doing so creates moral equivalency between a legitimate US indictment of Russian intelligence officers and a crazy, completely fabricated story invented by Putin,” McFaul tweeted.