President arrives in Finland for summit
Trump says he has “low expectations” for meeting with Putin.
President Donald Trump arrived Sunday in Finland for a one-on-one summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, hours after telling an interviewer that he was going into today’s meeting with “low expectations.”
Trump also said in the interview he had given no thought to asking Putin to extradite the dozen Russian military intelligence officers indicted last week on charges related to the hacking of Democratic targets in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
But after being given the idea by his interviewer, Trump said “certainly I’ll be asking about it” although extradition is high unlikely. The U.S. doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Moscow and can’t force the Russians to hand over citizens. Russia’s constitution also prohibits turning over citizens to foreign governments.
Trump flew to Finland, the final stop on a week long trip that began last Tuesday, from Scotland. He and his wife, Melania, spent the weekend at a golf resort Trump owns in Turnberry. He was planning to return to the White House
after today’s meeting with Putin in Helsinki, the Finnish capital.
Near Trump’s hotel, police roped off a group of about 60 pro-Trump demonstrators waving American flags. Big banners said “Welcome Trump” and “God Bless D & M Trump” and a helicopter hovered overhead.
Chants of “We Love Trump, We Love Trump” broke out as the president’s motorcade passed and Trump waved.
Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, said it would be “pretty silly” for Trump to ask Putin to hand over the indicted Russians.
“For the president to demand something that isn’t going to happen puts the president in a weak position, and I think the president has made it very clear he intends to approach this discussion from a position of strength,” Bolton said in a separate interview.
Trump told CBS News he’s going into the Helsinki summit with “low expectations. I’m not going with high expectations.” He declined to discuss his goals, but said such sessions are beneficial and cited his meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“Nothing bad is going to come out of it (Helsinki), and maybe some good will come out,” Trump said.
He described the European Union, a bloc of nations that includes many of America’s closest allies, as a “foe,” particularly on trade.
“I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade,” Trump said.
He said Russia is a foe “in certain respects” and that China is a foe “economically ... but that doesn’t mean they are bad. It doesn’t mean anything. It means that they are competitive.”
Trump has been reluctant to criticize Putin over the years and has described him as a competitor in recent days.
Trump sat for the interview Saturday in Scotland and CBS News released excerpts on Sunday, hours before Trump flew to Helsinki. From aboard Air Force One, Trump called the U.S. news media “the enemy of the people” and complained that he’ll face criticism regardless of the summit outcome.
“If I was given the great city of Moscow as retribution for all of the sins and evils committed by Russia over the years, I would return to criticism that it wasn’t good enough — that I should have gotten Saint Petersburg in addition!” he tweeted.
Trump and Putin have held talks twice before. Their first meeting came last July while both attended an international summit and lasted more than two hours, well over the scheduled 30 minutes. The leaders also met last fall during a separate summit in Vietnam.
But Jon Huntsman, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, said today’s meeting “is really the first time for both presidents to actually sit across the table and have a conversation and I hope it’s a detailed conversation about where we might be able to find some overlapping and shared interests.”
Congressional Democrats and at least one Republican have called on Trump to pull out of today’s meeting unless he is willing to make Russian election-meddling the top issue. Huntsman said the summit must go on because Russian engagement is needed to solve some international issues.