Trump wants ‘to move forward’ with Russia
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Sunday that he had “strongly pressed” Russian President Vladimir Putin twice about election meddling during their first face-to-face meeting last week, but he did not dispute Moscow’s claim that he had accepted Putin’s denial of involvement.
Trump 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 closeddoor meeting with Putin was an attempt to move beyond the controversy after Moscow characterized the election discussion as a meeting of minds rather than a showdown between the two leaders.
Trump’s tweets, though, did little to dispel that notion. He characterized his position 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.
By Sunday evening, Trump was tweeting a different tune, writing that just because he and Putin discussed the idea “doesn’t mean I think it can happen. It can’t.”
In one morning tweet, Trump said: “I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election. He vehemently denied it. I’ve already given my opinion.”
“We negotiated a ceasefire in parts of Syria which will save lives,” Trump continued in another message. “Now it is time to move forward in working constructively with Russia!”
The posts, which drew criticism from both Democrats and Republicans, served as Trump’s first public comments on the meeting after the White House declined to schedule the customary presidential news conference at the end of the Group of 20 gathering in Hamburg, Germany. Trump’s meeting with Putin came on the sideline of that event, which ended Saturday.
Putin, however, broke with his normal practice of not speaking to reporters and held a lengthy news conference in which he said that Trump had “agreed” with his statements about election interference. “Actually, you would better ask him how he found it,” Putin added.
A day earlier, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov — the only other Russian official in the meeting, which also included U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — said that Trump had not only accepted Putin’s denial but also told Putin that the election-meddling allegations had been “exaggerated” by some in the United States without proof.
Yet White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus 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 officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the private meeting, have said election interference took up about 40 minutes of the 135-minute discussion.
In Kiev, Ukraine, on Sunday, meanwhile, Tillerson said that Russia must make the first moves to rein in separatists in eastern Ukraine and remove its weaponry from that region. He also vowed that U.S. sanctions will remain in place until Moscow reverses its actions and respects the Ukrainian border.
After a meeting with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Tillerson told reporters that U.S. relations with Russia will not improve until Ukraine gets back full control of its territory from separatists he characterized as Russia’s “proxies” in two breakaway provinces.