Putin: Trump ‘agreed’ with assurances
Remarks differ from Tillerson take on talks
HAMBURG, Germany — Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday said that he thinks President Donald Trump agreed with his assurances that Moscow had not interfered in the 2016 presidential election, but suggested that reporters ask the U.S. president what he thought.
The White House did not confirm or deny Saturday the suggestion that Trump, embattled at home by an investigation into Russian meddling, had agreed with the Kremlin leader, who U.S. intelligence agencies allege over saw a hacking and disinformation effort.
Putin on Saturday said that Trump “asked many questions” about-Russian interference during their closed-door talks on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg. The Russian leader said he had repeated Moscow’s stance that “therewere no grounds to believe that Russia interfered in the U.S. electoral process.”
“It seemed to me that he took it into account, and agreed,” Putin told reporters on the sidelines of the summit. The Russian president added “you should ask him.”
Asked on several occasions during a briefing with reporters on Air Force One if they agreed with Russian assessments of Trump’s reaction, White House officials avoided giving a direct answer. “I think President Trump handled it brilliantly,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said repeatedly.
Putin’s recounting of the discussion of Russian interference was at odds with that of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who attended the meeting. Speaking to reporters Friday, Tillerson said that “President Putin denied such involvement,” but he did not say whether Trump accepted that assertion. Rather, Tillerson said Trump decided to move on because Russia would not admit blame.
Tillerson said, though, that the United States wasn’t dismissing Russian responsibility, and that the two sides had agreed to organize talks “regarding commitments of noninterference in the affairs of the United States and our democratic process.”
Putin expanded on that Saturday, saying that Russia and the United States had agreed to work together to “prevent interference in the domestic affairs of foreign states, primarily in Russia and the U.S.” Putin has repeatedly said that the United States has been interfering in Russian elections since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.
U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia meddled in the election to benefit Trump, but the president has refused to fully embrace the finding.
As a result, Trump’s public stance on the election — that “nobody really knows for sure” who hacked a Democratic Party email server — has echoed Putin’s ownwords.
It has also put the U.S. president a todds with members of his own administration. In an interview with CNN that is to air Sunday, Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that “everybody knows that Russia meddled in our elections.
“Everybody knows that they’re not just meddling in the United States’ election,” Haley said in the interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “They’re doing this
across multiple continents, and they’re doing this in a way that they’re trying to cause chaos within the countries.”
German leaders have said they are concerned Russia will try to sway their September elections in the same way U.S. intelligence says it did in the 2016vote. Putinon Saturday denied that aswell.
“We did not meddle in the U.S. either, why would we need to create some problems here too? We have good relations with Germany. It is our biggest trade and economic partner in Europe,” Putin said. Headded that the Western media “is constantly meddling in Russia’s domestic affairs but Moscow is taking this in its stride.”
Friday’s encounter between the leaders of the world’s nuclear superpowers had been highly anticipated at a time of increased tensions over the increasingly assertive military role in Syria.
Some in Moscow had anticipated that Trump’s presidency would offer a chance for a new era in U.S.-Russian relations, but that mood soured over the Trump administration’s tough stand on Russia’s support for rebels in Ukraine, which led to new sanctions against Moscowin June.