Trump invites Putin to US
‘Good for all’ that two leaders plan talks: Merkel
US President Donald Trump has invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to Washington DC this fall, the White House said on Thursday, a daring rebuttal to the torrent of criticism in the US over Trump’s failure to publicly confront Putin at their first summit for Moscow’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election.
Four days after Trump stunned the world by siding with Putin in Helsinki over his intelligence agencies, the president asked national security adviser John Bolton to issue the invitation to the Russian leader, said White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Friday that meetings between the US and Russian presidents should become the “normality,” adding that it is “good for all” that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin plan new talks.
“That talks are held is basically good for all, in particular between these two countries,” Merkel said at her regular summer press conference.
“I find that meetings between the US and Russian presidents must return to normality,” she said.
What happened at Monday’s one-on-one between Trump and Putin with only interpreters present remained a mystery, even to top officials and US lawmakers who said they had not been briefed.
The US president on Thursday listed the topics discussed as “stopping terrorism, security for Israel, nuclear proliferation, cyber attacks, trade, Ukraine, Middle East peace, North Korea and more.”
Trump’s director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, said in response to a question at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado: “Well, you’re right, I don’t know what happened at that meeting.”
The coveted invitation was sure to be seen as a victory by Putin, whose last official visit to the United States was in July 2007, when he spent two days at the Bush family compound.
Both Trump and Putin earlier on Thursday praised their first meeting as a success and blamed forces in the US for trying to belittle its achievements.
In one Twitter post, Trump blamed the media. “The Summit with Russia was a great success, except with the real enemy of the people, the Fake News Media.”
In Moscow, Putin said the summit “was successful overall and led to some useful agreements” without elaborating on the agreements.
Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer criticized the invitation. “Until we know what happened at that two hour meeting in Helsinki, the president should have no more one-on-one interactions with Putin. In the US, in Russia, or anywhere else,” he said in a statement.
Coats, who on Monday roundly defended the intelligence agencies’ findings of Russian meddling, also advised against a one-on-one meeting with Putin, saying he “would look for a different way of doing it.”