Live Updates
Rep. Will Hurd, a Republican from Texas, said President Trump’s remarks today that he misspoke during a news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin raises questions about what he said at their one-on-one meeting.
He continued: “This is an indication that when it comes to two important countries like the United States and a global spoiler like Russia, language is important, and being precise is important.”
Hurd said Trump must be consistent in his support for the US intelligence community and his understanding that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
The President’s comments today that “other people” could have also interfered in the election were confusing, Hurd said.
“It’s creating confusion with our allies,” he said.
Hurd later added: “I don’t think he should be doing one-on-one meetings with heads of state because too much is at stake.”
President Trump just tweeted tonight that his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki was “a great success.”
The President’s tweet comes hours after he sought to clarify remarks he made during a news conference with Putin on Monday.
Earlier today, Trump, facing bipartisan fury over his glowing remarks about Putin, said he had misspoken. Trump said that when he returned from the summit with Putin in Finland, he “realized there is some need for clarification” about his remarks on Russian interference in the 2016 US election.
“In a key sentence in my remarks I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t,’” the President said Tuesday. He explained he had reviewed a transcript and video of his remarks.
“The sentence should have been: ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,’” he said. “Sort of a double negative.”
During Monday’s news conference, Trump said, “I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia that interfered in the election.
Deputy Attorney Rod Rosenstein briefed President Trump last Monday on the forthcoming indictment against 12 Russian intelligence officers, before Trump left on his European trip, according to sources familiar with the meeting.
Justice Department officials were mindful of Trump’s upcoming meeting with the Russian President Vladimir Putin, and discussed the timing of the indictment with Trump, but no decisions were made at the meeting.
After consultations between Trump and top White House officials, the White House later told the Justice Department not to hold off on announcing the indictment, the sources explained. So Rosenstein made the announcement after the grand jury returned the indictment on Friday.
In announcing the indictment last week, Rosenstein explained why the President was told in advance about it.
“It was important for the President to know what information we’ve uncovered because he’s got to make very important decisions for the country, so he needs to understand what evidence we have of foreign election interference,” Rosenstein said.
President Trump, facing an onslaught of bipartisan fury over his glowing remarks about Vladimir Putin, said today he had misspoken during his news conference with the autocratic Russian leader.
Trump’s clarification came more than 24 hours after the news conference.
So why did it take so long to respond? An official said it’s the same story with so many things: He is surrounded by aides who don’t disagree with him — either they’re afraid to, he doesn’t want to hear it or they don’t see mistakes clearly. He had no one to tell him immediately after the press conference that he needed to clean up something, the official said.
Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said President Trump’s prepared remarks today sounded like he was “a hostage forced to read something.”
The California Democrat said Trump’s attempt to clarify his remarks in Helsinki were not credible.
“I don’t believe this at all. It is simply not credible that the President somehow misspoke,” Schiff said. “What the President said not only was consistent with what he said at the meeting but it is consistent with what he is saying all along. Indeed, this retraction is not only too little, too late, but too equivocal.”
As White House aides and a few outside advisers scrambled today to respond to the overwhelming criticism from the summit in Helsinki, President Trump concluded in a meeting that he wanted to say he misspoke.
Two officials said it was the President who led the crafting of his clarification. That’s how he wanted to characterize it.
It became clear that initial discussions of doing it on Twitter would not be enough and that he had to do something today. Trump was hearing from more people through phone calls and messages. He spoke to key lawmakers and outside confidants leading up to his afternoon remarks.
One driving factor was a fear of resignations in the intelligence community — possibly Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats or others — and a sense that it “looked unpatriotic.”
The President still believes the criticism is being blown way out of proportion, an official said, and he plans to try and turn the attacks on the press once again.
But his references to “no collision” and remarks that there “could be other people” were also viewed as another mistake, an official said.
“He is consumed with talk of no collusion,” an official said, saying he repeated it all day and “thinks it’s the answer to everything.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, is calling on President Trump’s interpreter, who attended his one-on-one meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, to testify before Congress.
She isn’t the only Democratic lawmaker calling for questioning the translator. Rep. Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts had called for the testimony in a series of tweets criticizing Trump on Monday.
Former Vice President Joe Biden said President Trump’s news conference in Helsinki helped Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “agenda.”
Speaking at a town hall on democracy at the University of Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia on Tuesday, Biden said Putin’s goal is to “break the liberal international order that was created after WWII — that have generated prosperity and peace at that time.”
He said Trump is “helping with this agenda.”
Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism coordinator, said President Trump’s behavior at Monday’s summit was reminiscent of someone who was acting like a “controlled asset” for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Clarke said Trump is acting in a way that he thinks Putin wants him to behave.
“I have been very reluctant to come to the conclusion that he’s a controlled asset, but that’s the term we use in the intelligence community when we have someone in another government who, for whatever reason, does what we want them to do because we’re bribing them, because we have something on them. He is acting like a controlled asset,” Clarke said.
Watch more:
President Trump moments ago said he misspoke during his Monday news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump was talking about interference in the 2016 election when he said, “I don’t see any reason why it would be” the Russians.
Now, Trump says he meant to say why it “wouldn’t be” Russia.
“In a key sentence in my remarks I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t,’” Trump said today. “The sentence should have been: ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.”
Watch the video from Monday:
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer rejected President Trump’s comments today.
Here’s Schumer’s full statement:
“President Trump tried to squirm away from what he said yesterday. It’s twenty-four hours too late, and in the wrong place. If the President can’t say directly to President Putin that he is wrong and we are right and our intelligence agencies are right, it’s ineffective, and worse, another sign of weakness. It tells President Putin ‘continue to take advantage of Donald Trump’ because he doesn’t have the courage, the strength, maybe not even the conviction to say to Putin’s face what he tried to say a few minutes ago.”
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, rejected President Trump’s statement today regarding his remarks at the summit.
Warner equated the behavior of the President today to his remarks in the aftermath of Charlottesville.
“My feeling is this has a strange resemblance to the President’s comments after he was so offensive to the disturbances in Charlottesville that he equated the Neo-nazis with the protesters,” he said.
Warner continued: “He then walked back those comments a couple of days later for about twelve hours before he got on another Fox TV show or tweeted again. So, I give these comments about twenty four hours before he once again slams the investigation, before he once again sided with authoritarians like Vladimir Putin.”
Top national security officials huddled at the White House on Tuesday to develop a response to the angry fallout from President Trump’s remarks in Helsinki, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Vice President Mike Pence and national security adviser John Bolton all met with Trump in the Oval Office today to go over his remarks ahead of his appearance in the Cabinet room this afternoon. A few other staffers were in the room, including chief of staff John Kelly and senior adviser Stephen Miller.
There were multiple meetings in the West Wing throughout the day to discuss how the response should be handled. Not all of the meetings involved the President directly.
Top officials, including Bolton, were involved in crafting the remarks that Trump delivered from the Cabinet Room.
When President Trump was presented with a typewritten script to read before reporters on Tuesday, he made some of his own additions: Scrawled in black marker were the words “THERE WAS NO COLUSION” – with the final word missing an L.
As Trump read his statement, aides in the back of the room read along, following the President’s words on their own copies of his script.
Trump, speaking to members of Congress, said he had “full faith” in the US intelligence community and accepted their assessment that Russia meddled in the 2016 election.
During his remarks, the President also insisted that “there was no collusion.”
Here’s a snapshot of Trump’s script:
President Trump said he returned from Helsinki on Monday and “realized there is some need for clarification” about his remarks on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“In a key sentence in my remarks I said the word would instead of wouldn’t,” Trump said. He explained he reviewed a transcript and video of his remarks.
“The sentence should have been: ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,’” he said. “Sort of a double negative.”
“I think that probably clarifies things pretty good on itself,” Trump said.
On Monday, Trump said during his press conference “I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia who interfered in the election.
President Donald Trump voiced support Tuesday for US intelligence agencies, a day after he refused to accept their findings on Russia’s election meddling over the denials of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and vowed to take action to prevent further interference.
Speaking with reporters at the White House and reading from several sheets of typewritten remarks, Trump reiterated that there was no collusion between his campaign and Russia and that the country’s efforts had no impact on the final results.
“I have full faith and support for America’s great intelligence agencies” Trump said. “Always have.”
He added that he “felt very strongly that while Russia’s actions had no impact at all on the outcome of the election… I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election took place.”
“Could be other people also,” he said. “There’s a lot of people out there.”
He also called his summit with Putin in Helsinki, Finland, a success.
Watch the moment:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sought today to address concerns from European allies about President Trump’s remarks at yesterday’s summit in Helsinki.
McConnell, speaking from Capitol Hill, said the European Union are friends of the US, the Russians are not.
“Over the last few years, the annexation of Crimea, the invasion of eastern Ukraine, not to mention the indisputable evidence that they tried to impact the 2016 election,” he said. “So make no mistake about it, I would say to our friends in Europe, we understand the Russian threat.”
We’re standing by for President Trump, who is expected to make remarks on the Putin summit at the start of his meeting with Republican members of Congress.
We will probably never really know what happened at Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s private meeting.
But we do know what happened when the two men held a joint press conference on Monday. Journalists bluntly conveyed shock at what they had just witnessed.
That shock and concern continued to dominate the coverage a full 24 hours later. The White House stayed mostly silent and by midday on Tuesday, there was still no afternoon press briefing on the daily schedule.
Even some of the president’s biggest boosters on Fox News conceded that Trump had made a big mistake in Helsinki.
“I will say this to the President,” “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade said Tuesday morning. “When Newt Gingrich, when General Jack Keane, when Matt Schlapp say the President fell short and made our intelligence apparatus look bad, I think it’s time to pay attention.”
Kilmeade claimed it was “easily correctable.”
That’s debatable. The tone of Monday and Tuesday’s news coverage suggested that there will be long memories of Monday’s press conference.
Immediately after his news conference alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump’s mood was buoyant, people familiar with the matter said.
He walked off stage in Helsinki with little inkling his remarks would cause the firestorm they did, and was instead enthusiastic about what he felt was a successful summit.
By the time he’d returned to the White House just before 10 p.m. ET on Monday, however, his mood had soured.
Predictably, the President was upset when he saw negative coverage of the summit airing on television aboard Air Force One. It was clear he was getting little support, even from the usual places.
He vented to aides traveling with him, including new communications chief Bill Shine and policy aide Stephen Miller. First lady Melania Trump was also aboard and was involved in some of the discussions, but not all of them, the people familiar with the matter said.
Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking member of Senate Intel, told reporters that President Trump showed “enormous weakness on the world stage” during his press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“He basically kowtowed to the Russian leader — a Russian leader who doesn’t respect the rule of law, doesn’t respect free press, that puts his political opponents in jail … and somehow he’s seeming to be siding with him rather than our NATO allies and European allies,” Warner said.
Warner said he hopes he and other lawmakers will be briefed on the entire Trump-Putin summit, including their one-on-one meeting.
“I think we need to do more than statements calling out the President’s actions individually, and I’m talking with my Republican colleagues now on legislative and other actions. One area that I hope will be broad base consensus is we need to get a briefing as soon as possible about what happened not only in the group setting, but what I’m deeply concerned about, and warned the administration beforehand, was what happened in this one-on-one setting.
President Trump will make remarks about his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at 2 p.m. at the start of his meeting with members of Congress, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said.
Republicans are unhappy with President Trump’s comments at his press conference with Putin. But it appears they’re unlikely to do much about it.
CNN congressional correspondent Phil Mattingly just told CNN chief national correspondent John King what he’s been hearing behind the scenes over the course of the last 24 hours, talking with lawmakers and senior Republican aides about President Donald Trump’s embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denial that Russia meddled in the US election, and his failure to embrace the conclusion of the US intelligence agencies conclusion that he did.
He noted “a sense of forlorn acceptance” among the Republicans, and a feeling that “there’s nothing more Republicans think they can do.”
Noting they’ve passed an extension of sanctions, an increase in defense funding, support for Baltic states, Mattingly said the feeling is, “What else is there for them to do, given this is where the President clearly is and he’s – according to one senator – just ignoring his foreign policy team.”
The bottom line, Mattingly said, is this will likely go the way of a lot of the controversies we’ve seen over the last 15 or 16 months: Republicans unnerved. Republicans unhappy. Republicans acknowledging that this diverges strongly ideologically from where they stand on a specific issue.
But in terms of, will there be anything substantive they do on Capitol Hill? The short answer right now, at least, appears to be no.
Watch him explain:
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called on Republican colleagues to join in “demanding testimony” from President Donald Trump’s national security team present during the Helsinki summit earlier this week, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “immediately.”
“And very importantly, probably most importantly, our Republican colleagues need to join us in demanding testimony from the President’s national security team that was in Helsinki – and we need to do that immediately,” the New York Democrat said from the Senate floor Tuesday.
Read more:
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham just spoke to CNN about the Trump-Putin press conference, calling it a “bad day for the President” and demanding Trump “fix it.”
“I think it was a bad day for the President,” Graham said. “I think he can fix it - I think he needs to fix it.”
Asked by a reporter, “What now?”, Graham responded:
He added, “I don’t mind meeting with our adversaries. Russia is definitely an adversary, but I want to make sure we’re being informed as to what potential agreements were made and whether or not we think, in Congress, it makes sense. I think that’s what we do going forward is try to find out what the game plan is.”
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker was exasperated as he talked about Trump’s summit yesterday and he was clear that Congress has limited options. Trump is the president and he said in a 15-minute presser, Trump “can do more damage than it takes us months to overcome.”
He said “its hard to overcome no matter what we do here.”
Corker said if Congress is serious about pulling back Trump’s power abroad, they need to pass Corker’s tariff legislation. On more sanctions, he said Congress has already passed robust sanctions and he fears a resolution does little in reality.
Asked if he was afraid that the national security community would resign en masse, Corker appeared distraught.
He brought up Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary James Mattis by name.
“I don’t want those people to leave, “Corker said. “You can tell people are trying to think through how do they deal with this.”
“People say why don’t you all leave your party? Look, this is my party. This is my party. I’ve been here longer.”
He added more just about the summit and how Congress needs to be careful and deliberate unlike the White House.
He said the White House should be doing damage control today.
Russian President Vladimir Putin seemed to justify the hacking of Democrats because the information dispersed was true, after denying that Russia had interfered in the US 2016 presidential election.
“Russia as a state has never interfered with the internal affairs of the United States, let alone its elections,” Putin told Fox News’ Chris Wallace in an interview that aired Monday evening. Putin’s remarks were being translated.
Note: The US intelligence community has concluded that Russia did interfere with the 2016 election.
Earlier on Monday, Putin, standing next to President Trump at a news conference, insisted that Russia “never interfered” with American affairs, including the 2016 presidential election.
Watch more from the Fox interview:
House Speaker Paul Ryan, answering questions at the House GOP’s weekly press conference, said that while he did not believe President Trump’s actions alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin arose to treason as alleged by former CIA chief John Brennan (“I do not,” he said), said he clearly believes “Russia did meddle with our elections.”
“Russia is trying to undermine democracy itself, to delegitimize democracy, so they can be look good by comparison. Let’s be really clear about that,” Ryan said.
“We know they interfered with our elections, and we have passed sanctions on Russia to hold them accountable. More importantly, what we intend to do, is be sure that they don’t get away with it again.”
He added that he has not yet spoken to President Trump since he made the remarks in Helsinki, and that a statement he issued shortly after the press conference concluded, in which he said, “The President must appreciate that Russia is not our ally,” still stands.
Asked if supported legislation to protect special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, Ryan said, “He should be allowed to finish his investigation and carry out his work. Nothing’s changed.”
Former intelligence chiefs, top Republicans and outspoken voices in the conservative media all joined Democrats in their criticisms of President Trump’s refusal to call Putin out for interfering in the US election.
But Trump just tweeted that the “Fake News is going Crazy,” claiming that the media is failing to report on the successes of his private, one-on-one meeting with President Putin (which he described as “even better” than his meeting with NATO members).
Here’s Trump’s tweet:
Former President Obama, addressing crowds in South Africa on Tuesday to mark the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth, said that much of the world wants to “return to an older, a more dangerous, a more brutal way of doing business.”
“The politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment began to appear — and that kind of politics is now on the move,” he said.” “I am not being alarmist, I am simply stating the facts … Look around.”
He then called out “far-right” parties in the west:
“Who needs free speech as long as the economy is going good?” he quipped.
Why this matters today: Obama made the remarks one day after President Trump’s widely panned press conference alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has been accused of silencing his critics in politics and the press.
Pete King stands by House Intel report in an interview with CNN on Tuesday, but said President Trump made a “mistake” to side with Putin.
The House Intelligence Committee’s report – drafted by the GOP majority – disputed the findings by the intelligence community that Vladimir Putin wanted Donald Trump to become president.
But here’s the thing: Putin yesterday confirmed he wanted Trump to win.
Pete King told CNN he “absolutely” stands by that report because he has seen the intelligence and doesn’t believe Putin.
Also, King said that Trump made a “mistake” by siding with Putin and needs to correct it immediately and there is “no moral equivalence” between the United States and Russia.
Watch Putin’s answer:
Former US President Barack Obama is addressing some 15,000 people in South Africa on Tuesday to mark the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth, a day after his successor, Donald Trump, upbraided the US in a news conference with Vladimir Putin.
The speech by Obama, who has made an art of criticizing the President’s values without explicitly naming Trump, follows a humiliating conference in Helsinki, Finland on Monday in which Trump sided with Putin over his own country’s intelligence agencies on whether Moscow interfered in the 2016 US election.
Alluding to the “strange and uncertain times that we are in,” Obama promised to spend the lecture “reflecting on where we’ve been, and how we arrived at this present moment, in the hope that it will offer us a roadmap for where we need to go next.”
We’ll share more quotes here as we get them. Watch live here.
Republican Rep. Mike Turner, who has served Ohio’s 10th congressional district in Congress since 2003, called President Trump’s comments during a news conference after his Putin summit “deeply damaging,” adding, “the President needs to understand he has damaged national foreign policy.”
Watch:
President Trump just sent Rand Paul a thank you note via Twitter for the Kentucky senator’s defense of his highly controversial remarks at the Putin press conference.
Trump tweeted:
What Rand Paul said: Republican Sen. Rand Paul said on Monday that the conversation around Russian interference in the 2016 US election and President Donald Trump’s break with the intelligence community on the issue was misdirected and animated by anti-Trump animus. “Any country that can spy does, and any country that can meddle in foreign elections does,” the Kentucky Republican said on CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.”
He continued, “All countries are doing this, but we’ve elevated this to a higher degree, and we’ve made this all about the sour grapes of Hillary Clinton losing the election, and it’s all about partisan politics now. This is truly the Trump derangement syndrome that motivates all of this.”
Watch:
Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci called on President Donald Trump to “reverse course immediately” and walk back some of his statements made during his press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Trump’s made a very big mistake here. He’s got to reverse course immediately,” Scaramucci said Tuesday in an interview with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on “New Day.”
He added, “If you’re loyal to the President —which I happen to be very loyal to the President— loyalty right now requires you to tell the truth and sit with him and explain to him the optics of the situation, why the optics are bad.”
Watch:
For as long as history remembers Donald Trump, it will be a day that will live in infamy.
The President’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday is already one of the most notorious moments in the tortured relations between Washington and Moscow.
Trump’s humiliation is taking its place alongside John Kennedy’s bruising at the hands of Nikita Khrushchev, and George W. Bush staring into Putin’s eyes and getting a sense of his soul.
Like those moments in US-Russia summit lore, the events that unfolded Monday are likely to have significant and unpredictable political and geopolitical reverberations in the United States and around the world.
Trump’s favoring of Putin’s denial of election interference accusations leveled by the US intelligence community was not just the most abject display given by any President overseas, it may be the moment that finally validated claims that Trump prizes his own interests above those of America.
The most obvious question – why did Trump cave so spectacularly to Putin – is likely to remain cloudy going forward, at least unless special counsel Robert Mueller finds evidence the President is beholden to the Russian leader.
But there are going to be profound consequences in Washington and beyond.
President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Helsinki, Finland, today during an extraordinary summit. Here’s everything you need to know:
Michael Anton, former National Security Council spokesperson under President Trump, canceled his long-scheduled appearance tonight on CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront because he said he couldn’t defend Trump today.
He had been scheduled for a couple of weeks to be on the show to talk about the summit, Burnett said.
She said Anton told CNN, “He just couldn’t do it so he couldn’t come on.”
Republican Rep. Mark Meadows, the head of the House Freedom Caucus, declined to criticize President Trump for his comments today about Russian election meddling.
Meadows was one of the few Republicans on Capitol Hill to defend Trump’s comments.
“You’ve got to look at the backdrop that we’re talking about here,” he said. “The backdrop we’re talking about is that with 12 indictments that came out while the President was on his way to Russia, everyone wanted to put that this is evidence of collusion this is why you have to make sure you reign it in. In fact, it was none of that. It had nothing to do with collusion, the information that came out in the indictments really should have been a yawn. We’ve known about some of this stuff for a long time.”
“To suggest that Russia changed the election outcome is not something I ascribe to, and quite frankly not something most Americans ascribe to,” he added.
Meadows said he has faith in both Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“To draw far-reaching conclusions from a press conference, I don’t think is indicative where we are as a nation, where this president is or what actions are required on our part,” he said.
Talks have begun on Capitol Hill to reaffirm support in the Senate for the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the US elections, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn told CNN.
The discussions have only just begun, but GOP lawmakers are discussing putting together a measure that would clearly state support for the unanimous conclusion within the intelligence community that Russia was behind the 2016 attacks on the US elections.
“There’s some discussion about what we might be able to do to let the community know we are supportive of them and their efforts — and not be confused by any of this,” the Texas Republican said in an interview after President Trump’s remarks in Helsinki today.
During a news conference earlier today, Trump declined to endorse the US government’s assessment, saying he doesn’t “see any reason why” Russia would be responsible for the 2016 attacks.
If the Senate plan comes together, it could amount to the third symbolic rebuke of Trump:
Last week, the Senate voted on a non-binding resolution reaffirming support for NATO, just as Trump levied fierce attacks against the alliance. Then, the Senate voted overwhelmingly calling on Congress to have a role when the President cites national security as a reason for imposing tariffs, as he’s done on Europe, Mexico and Canada.
Cornyn said it’s possible senators may put together another “sense of the Senate” resolution, which would not be binding but would allow the GOP-led chamber to formally register its objections with Trump’s stunning comments alongside Putin.
Russian President Vladimir Putin downplayed the role hackers might have played in the US election since the information they stole revealed accurate information about the Democratic Party.
“Was there any false information planted? No, it wasn’t,” Putin said in an interview with Fox News. “These hackers…they hacked a certain email account and there was an information about manipulation conducted within the Democratic Party to incline the process in favor of one candidate and as far as I know the entire party leadership resigned.”
Pressed multiple times, Putin didn’t outright deny Russian involvement in the hack, but said instead the information was important for voters.
“They admitted the fact of their manipulation, so that’s one thing. Manipulation of the public opinion should stop and an apology should be made to the public at large instead of looking for those responsible or the party at fault,” he said.
“The information that I am aware of, there is nothing false about it, every single grain of it is true. And the Democratic leadership admitted it,” Putin added.
President Trump will have a closed meeting with members of Congress tomorrow, a day after his controversial summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The topic of the meeting is not yet disclosed.
Former Vice President Joe Biden said President Trump’s remarks at a joint news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin “do not reflect what Americans think and who we are.”
In a statement, he said today’s news conference between Trump and Putin was “beneath the dignity of the office of the President.”
“Today our President had the chance to confront an adversary who has attacked — and continues to attack — our democracy and our allies. He could have stood up for American interests and values. He chose not to. Instead, he embraced our number one adversary, blamed America rather than Russian aggression for the deterioration in our bilateral relations, trashed his own justice department, and put Putin’s word above that of our own intelligence community whose leaders he appointed.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry also issued a statement about Trump’s meeting, saying the President “surrendered lock, stock and barrel to President Putin’s deceptions about the attacks on America’s democracy.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin again denied Russian interference in the US election, and declined to read a copy of last week’s indictments from Robert Mueller when presented them in an interview.
“Russia as a state has never interfered with the internal affairs of the United States,” Putin said in an interview with Fox News. “Do you really believe that someone acting from the Russian territory could have influenced the United States?”
Interviewer Chris Wallace handed a copy of the indictments to Putin, who gestured for them to be placed on a nearby coffee table. He went on to insist that Russia is prepared to help the US investigate the 12 individuals named in the indictments. But he said no formal request had been made from special counsel Robert Mueller.
“Why wouldn’t special counsel Mueller send us a request within the framework of this agreement,” he said, referring to a US-Russia agreement on law enforcement matter. “Nobody sent us a single letter.”
Putin insisted he wasn’t interested in the meddling issue, saying it was a domestic issue.
“It’s nothing to be proud of for American democracy to use such dirty political methods,” he said.
He downplayed Trump’s conciliatory remarks at the press conference. “Was it worth going all the way to Helsinki to just insult one another? It’s not exactly the diplomatic standard,” Putin said. “We met to try to find a way for improving our relationship and not aggravating it.”
Putin denied Russia had any compromising information on Trump or his family.
“We don’t have anything on them and there can’t be anything on them,” he said. “It’s clear that we did nothing of that kind against President Trump.”
Republican Sen. Rand Paul told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer he supports President Trump’s decision to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and he doesn’t think Trump threw his intelligence community under the bus.
“I don’t see it that way at all, but many Democrats have come forward and they basically want a confrontation,” Paul said.
He continued: “That’s a kind of sort of I think simplistic thinking that leads to war. We should have conversation even with the adversaries, probably most particularly with the adversaries.”
Both Democrats and Republicans have come out and criticized Trump’s remarks today, saying he should have stood with the US intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Instead, Trump declined to endorse the US government’s assessment, saying he doesn’t “see any reason why” Russia would be responsible.
During the CNN interview, Paul also said he believes the US intelligence community has “way too much power,” but he’s not discounting that “allegations that the Russians hacked into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails.”
The Kentucky lawmaker said people hate Trump so much that they are forgetting Russia’s important role in the world. Paul said Russia tried to help stop the Boston marathon bombing and added that they were a nuclear power.
“And I think that what is lost in this is that I think there’s a bit of Trump derangement syndrome,” Paul said. “And I think they are people that hate the President so much that this could have been President Obama early in the first administration setting the reset button and trying to have better relations with Russia.”
Hillary Clinton tweeted ahead of the Trump-Putin meeting, “Question for President Trump as he meets Putin: Do you know which team you play for?”
It appears she got her answer.
Newt Gingrich, normally a backer of President Trump, called on him to clarify his remarks at the news conference in Helsinki, which he said were “the most serious mistake of his presidency.”
Former FBI Director James Comey took to Twitter to blast President Trump for his performance during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland.
In a tweet, Comey said Trump “refused to back his own country”:
Trump is no fan of Comey, whom he fired last May. Trump has gone back and forth on his reasons for firing Comey, who had been leading the bureau’s investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Trump told NBC News last year that he was thinking of “this Russia thing” when he decided to fire Comey.
Then in April, the President said Comey was not fired because of the Russia investigation.
Asked about President Trump’s performance today, a source close to White House said, “Everyone around him is afraid to tell him he shouldn’t do these things.”
The source said Trump is surrounded by people who can’t find better jobs outside the White House. They are fearful of losing their powerful positions, which explains the reluctance to disagree with him.
Finnish President Sauli Niinistö told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour the Helsinki summit allowed Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to stand on an “even footing” with President Trump.
Niinistö, who held separate meetings with both men in the Finnish capital, warned that Putin would leave Helsinki carrying “a kind of burden” with questions still looming over Russia’s actions in Ukraine, Crimea and the ongoing sanctions imposed on Moscow by the US and European Union.
“I think for him it was important to be on an even footing with the American President,” Niinistö said.
President Donald Trump’s stunning news conference Monday next to Russian President Vladimir Putin, during which he failed to back the US intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election over Putin’s denial, is being widely panned by Democrats, former intelligence chiefs, and Republican critics like Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake.
Today, there a few new voices in the pool of condemnations, most notably ones who typically supported Trump in the past like House Speaker Paul Ryan and Reps. Liz Cheney and Trey Gowdy.
Here’s what they said:
House Speaker Paul Ryan
Paul Ryan contradicted several comments Trump made during his Helsinki news conference, most notably backing the US intelligence community assessment that Russia meddled with the US 2016 presidential election.
“There is no question that Russia interfered in our election and continues attempts to undermine democracy here and around the world,” said Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, in a statement. “That is not just the finding of the American intelligence community but also the House Committee on Intelligence.”
Ryan continued, “The president must appreciate that Russia is not our ally. There is no moral equivalence between the United States and Russia, which remains hostile to our most basic values and ideals. The United States must be focused on holding Russia accountable and putting an end to its vile attacks on democracy.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
Mitch McConnell spoke briefly with reporters Monday, giving his support to the US intelligence community. “I’ve said a number of times and I say it again, the Russians are not our friends and I entirely believe the assessment of our intelligence community,” the Kentucky Republican said. (He did not answer a question on whether he would tell Trump that he disagreed with him.)
Rep. Trey Gowdy
Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican who was among the Republicans leading last week’s sharply partisan hearing of FBI agent Peter Strzok, made clear Monday he did not see Russia as a US ally. “I am confident former CIA Director and current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, DNI Dan Coats, Ambassador Nikki Haley, FBI Director Chris Wray, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and others will be able to communicate to the President it is possible to conclude Russia interfered with our election in 2016 without delegitimizing his electoral success,” Gowdy said in a statement.
Rep. Liz Cheney
Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, tweeted:
Sen. Orrin Hatch
Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, a key Trump ally, issued a statement backing up the intelligence community.
“Russia interfered in the 2016 election,” Hatch said in a statement. “Our nation’s top intelligence agencies all agree on that point. From the President on down, we must do everything in our power to protect our democracy by securing future elections from foreign influence and interference, regardless of what Vladimir Putin or any other Russian operative says. I trust the good work of our intelligence and law enforcement personnel who have sworn to protect the United States of America from enemies foreign and domestic.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, in an interview, described President Trump as a “very competent man, he is in the know, he listens and on some issues he sticks to his opinion.”
Speaking to Russian state run channel “Channel 1”, Putin said that he felt Trump was more than a business man.
“Everyone considers him exclusively a businessman, I think that is not the case, because after all he is already a politician, primarily because he can listen and hear what the voter expects from him, what the population expects,” Putin told the TV station.
Rep. Walter Jones, always a Republican outlier and one of a few House Republicans to sign onto Democratic legislation to protect Robert Mueller, said of today’s Trump-Putin press conference: “I’ve never been more disappointed in my life.”
“The ghost of Reagan is probably mad as hell,” Jones said.
Jones also said he would be “adamantly opposed” to Republican efforts to impeach Rod Rosenstein, calling him “a man of integrity and quality.” He said last week’s hearing with Peter Strzok was “stupid” for Republicans.
Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, said she “strongly disagrees” with President Trump’s comments at the summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin and reaffirms congressional support for the intelligence community.
“It’s certainly not helpful for the President to express doubt about the conclusions of his own team,” she said. “He has assembled a first rate intelligence team handled by Dan Coats and I would hope that he would take their analysis over the predictable denials of President Putin.”
Collins said she hopes the intelligence community will not get discouraged by Trump’s remarks in Helsinki.
“I have great confidence in their ability, their dedication, and their analysis, and I think they know they have very strong support here on Capitol Hill.”
Asked if the President is too soft on Russian President Vladimir Putin, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “I’ve said a number of times and I say it again, the Russians are not our friends and I entirely believe the assessment of our intelligence community.”
He would not answer if he would tell President Trump he disagreed with him, and would not answer if Director of National Intelligence Coats should resign.
President Trump just tweeted from Air Force One that he has confidence in his intelligence community.
His tweet come as he faces a flood of criticism over his remarks at a news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland.
At the press conference, Trump declined to endorse the US government’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, saying he doesn’t “see any reason why” Russia would be responsible.
Read his tweet:
Don Stewart, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s spokesperson, said the Kentucky lawmaker agrees with the US intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said he was “appalled” by President Trump’s comments at his press conference with Russia’s Vladimir Putin today, saying he “couldn’t get worse than his performance at the NATO summit — but it sure did.”
At the press conference, Trump declined to side with US intelligence on Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
A few more key line’s from Schumer’s criticism of Trump:
Texas Rep. Will Hurd criticized President Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
During a news conference, Trump declined to endorse the US government’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, saying he doesn’t “see any reason why” Russia would be responsible.
Hurd tweeted that “the President is wrong,” saying Russia did interfere in the 2016 election.
Read his tweets:
White House officials are openly admitting they don’t know how to respond to questions about President Trump’s striking news conference in Helsinki today.
Aides who traveled with the President in Europe boarded Air Force One around 8:33 p.m. local time (1:33 p.m. ET), leaving those back in Washington to field inquiries for the next eight and half hours.
Staffers who are answering their phones — without requiring it be off the record — don’t have much to say.
But here’s what they are saying: Asked if anyone from the administration will resign over the President’s remarks, a senior White House official quipped, “Good question.” So far, none have defended what the President said, with only one noting it was simply Trump’s interpretation of things.
CNN has only received one response, from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence regarding previous statements about Russian interference in the election.
The CIA, FBI, NSA, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, national security adviser John Bolton, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and press secretary Sarah Sanders have yet to respond.
Republican Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said there’s no doubt that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
He added that any statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin contradicting the US intelligence’s assessment is “a lie and should be recognized as one by the President.”
Burr’s committee is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Here’s Burr’s statement:
“The Senate Intelligence Committee has reviewed the 2017 IC assessment and found no reason to doubt its conclusion that President Putin ordered an influence campaign aimed at the 2016 U.S. elections with the goal of undermining faith in our democratic process. Russia has conducted a coordinated cyberattack on state election systems, and hacked critical infrastructure. They have used social media to sow chaos and discord in our society. They have beaten and harassed U.S. diplomats and violated anti-proliferation treaties. Any statement by Vladimir Putin contrary to these facts is a lie and should be recognized as one by the President. Vladimir Putin is not our friend and never has been. Nor does he want to be our friend. His regime’s actions prove it. We must make clear that the United States will not tolerate hostile Russian activities against us or our allies.”
Dan Coats, director of National intelligence, said the US intelligence community has “been clear” in its assessments of Russian interference the in the 2016 election, describing their actions as “ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy.”
“We will continue to provide unvarnished and objective intelligence in support of our national security,” Coats said in a statement.
Here’s the full statement:
The role of the Intelligence Community is to provide the best information and fact-based assessments possible for the President and policymakers. We have been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy, and we will continue to provide unvarnished and objective intelligence in support of our national security.
A senior intel official said Coats made the decision to issue the statement after internal discussions this morning. The official said Coats and his team were presented with “a choice” after they received Trump’s comments and chose to move forward with a public statement in Coats’ name backing the intel assessment.
The official said the statement was not cleared with the White House.
Vice President Pence is speaking at the Commerce Department today and mentioned President Trump’s meeting with Putin at the top of his remarks.
“The world saw once again that President Donald Trump stands without apology as leader of the free world,” Pence said. “Earlier today, President Trump completed what he described as a direct, open, and deeply productive dialogue with President Putin in Helsinki. As the President said, it was a constructive day. But it was only the beginning.”
Pence continued: “Disagreements between our countries were discussed at length, and what the world saw, and the American people saw, is that President Donald Trump will always put the prosperity and security of America first.”
Since the meeting — in which Trump declined to side with US intelligence on Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election — numerous Republicans and Democrats have criticized his performance.
In a blistering shot at President Trump, Republican Sen. John McCain called today’s news conference “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”
He added that it was a “recent low point” in the history of the presidency, calling the summit “a tragic mistake.”
Read his full statement:
“Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake. President Trump proved not only unable, but unwilling to stand up to Putin. He and Putin seemed to be speaking from the same script as the president made a conscious choice to defend a tyrant against the fair questions of a free press, and to grant Putin an uncontested platform to spew propaganda and lies to the world. It is tempting to describe the press conference as a pathetic rout – as an illustration of the perils of under-preparation and inexperience. But these were not the errant tweets of a novice politician. These were the deliberate choices of a president who seems determined to realize his delusions of a warm relationship with Putin’s regime without any regard for the true nature of his rule, his violent disregard for the sovereignty of his neighbors, his complicity in the slaughter of the Syrian people, his violation of international treaties, and his assault on democratic institutions throughout the world. Coming close on the heels of President Trump’s bombastic and erratic conduct towards our closest friends and allies in Brussels and Britain, today’s press conference marks a recent low point in the history of the American Presidency. That the president was attended in Helsinki by a team of competent and patriotic advisors makes his blunders and capitulations all the more painful and inexplicable. No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant. Not only did President Trump fail to speak the truth about an adversary; but speaking for America to the world, our president failed to defend all that makes us who we are—a republic of free people dedicated to the cause of liberty at home and abroad. American presidents must be the champions of that cause if it is to succeed. Americans are waiting and hoping for President Trump to embrace that sacred responsibility. One can only hope they are not waiting totally in vain.”
Sen. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Senate Republican, made it clear that he believes the intelligence community and special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments.
Cornyn says Trump seems concerned his election is being delegitimized by critics.
Asked why he thinks President Trump has trouble believing the intelligence community, is it because he thinks it undermines his election, here’s what Cornyn said:
“I think there is some element of that. He takes it all very personally like this is an attempt by Hillary supporters to delegitimize his election. But everyone agrees it didn’t change the outcome, and, to me, I think that is a critical point.”
Outgoing South Carolina Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy, in a statement, said he’s confident that US intelligence officials and others will explain to President Trump that “it is possible to conclude Russia interfered with our election in 2016 without delegitimizing his electoral success.”
Gowdy, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, reiterated what several other Republican lawmakers said today: “Russia is not our friend.”
Read Gowdy’s full statement:
“Russia is not our friend. Russia attempted to undermine the fundamentals of our democracy, impugn the reliability of the 2016 election, and sow the seeds of discord among Americans. Our intelligence community, including the current one, concluded this, as did the Majority House Intelligence Committee report, as did our fellow Americans who served on grand juries which returned true bills on two separate occasions. I am confident former CIA Director and current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, DNI Dan Coats, Ambassador Nikki Haley, FBI Director Chris Wray, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and others will be able to communicate to the President it is possible to conclude Russia interfered with our election in 2016 without delegitimizing his electoral success.”
Republican Sen. Bob Corker said President Trump should have been more forceful with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He said he was disappointed by Trump’s remarks, which he added made the US look like a “pushover.”
Corker said he doesn’t know why Trump is denying Russia’s interference in the US election. Corker insisted that Russia attacked the US election.
“I just don’t know what it is about the President that continues to deny that that occurred,” he said.
Corker said Putin gained a “tremendous amount” today and was probably eating caviar on the plane home.
Watch more:
In a statement released after President Trump’s news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said Trump “must appreciate that Russia is not our ally.”
Here’s Ryan’s full statement:
“There is no question that Russia interfered in our election and continues attempts to undermine democracy here and around the world. That is not just the finding of the American intelligence community but also the House Committee on Intelligence.”The president must appreciate that Russia is not our ally. There is no moral equivalence between the United States and Russia, which remains hostile to our most basic values and ideals. The United States must be focused on holding Russia accountable and putting an end to its vile attacks on democracy.”
President Trump just departed Helsinki, Finland, after his one-on-one meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He is now headed to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.
A US official says the translator in President Trump’s one-on-one with Russian President Vladimir Putin will likely be debriefed, at least informally, by other US officials about some of what took place in the meeting.
The official said this was not unusual practice for one-on-one meetings, but after Trump’s performance at the press conference the contents of that session are gaining greater scrutiny.
The translator’s main focus in the meeting is to translate the leaders’ words, not to take notes for posterity, so her accounting of the meeting is not considered an official record.
About the translator: Marina Gross has previously translated for the State Department and other government entities. She accompanied first lady Laura Bush to Sochi, Russia, in 2008.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said his meeting with the President Trump was “really very informative and useful,” according to Russian state media.
While meeting with the Finnish President after the talks with Trump, Putin also said Helsinki had become a real world political capital and thanked President Sauli Niinistö for hosting the meeting.
Senior Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, a key Trump ally, just issued a statement, following President Trump’s explosive news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
During the news conference, Trump said he had no reason to think Russia hacked into the US election.
But Hatch of Utah disagrees, and said it’s a known fact that Russia interfered in the US election.
Here’s his full statement:
“Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Our nation’s top intelligence agencies all agree on that point. From the President on down, we must do everything in our power to protect our democracy by securing future elections from foreign influence and interference, regardless of what Vladimir Putin or any other Russian operative says. I trust the good work of our intelligence and law enforcement personnel who have sworn to protect the United States of America from enemies foreign and domestic.”
A US official directly involved with Helsinki summit sums it up like this: “This was not the plan.”
While it was widely expected from planning conversations that President Trump wouldn’t change tactics here in Helsinki and aggressively confront Putin on election interference, the hope and plan was that he would do what he has done before: pivot.
But he doubled down instead, which again “was not the plan”
President Trump’s news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin has not gone over with US allies.
Here’s how a few are reacting:
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that the talks between the Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Trump were “magnificent,” Russian media reports.
He added that the talks were “better than super.”
Democratic senators are reacting to President Trump’s press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
During the conference, Trump declined to side with US intelligence on the issue of Russian election interference. It came days after he criticized top US allies at the NATO summit.
Here’s how the Democrats are reacting:
Chris Murphy from Connecticut
Mark Warner from Virginia
Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts
Tim Kane from Virginia
Bill Nelson from Florida
As CNN reached out for reaction, a senior White House official asks: “How bad was that?”
That is the mindset right now among some of the President’s top advisers. The ones in Helsinki will be on a plane for seven or eight hours, unable to spin this.
The ones in the West Wing are trying to figure out at this hour how to respond and redirect how election meddling and Trump’s own words and allegiance with Putin overtook the entire summit.
A Republican official close — and friendly — to the White House said, “We now know why he wanted to meet one on one.”
Two Republican lawmakers took to Twitter to criticize President Trump’s performance during a joint news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Sen. Jeff Flake from Arizona
Sen. Lindsey Graham from South Carolina
CNN’s Anderson Cooper reacted to President Trump’s remarks at a joint news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin shortly after they ended.
Trump, at the news conference, said he didn’t see a reason for Russia hacking into the 2016 presidential election.
Cooper said Trump was given the chance the opportunity to give a statement on election interference, and “he blinked.”
Former CIA Director John Brennan just tweeted a strongly worded reaction to President Trump’s news conference, saying it “was nothing short of treasonous.”
Here’s his tweet:
Russian President Vladimir Putin denied Russian interference in the 2016 US election. (Meanwhile, US intelligence agencies insist Russians did interfere.)
Trump declined to endorse the US intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the election, saying Putin was “extremely strong and powerful” in his denial.
Instead, the US president repeatedly asked about the Democratic National Committee’s email server and Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.
Here’s the moment:
So let me just say that we have two thoughts: You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven’t they taken the server? Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee? I’ve been wondering that. I’ve been asking that for months and months, and I’ve been tweeting it out and calling it out on social media. Where is the server? I want to know where is the server and what is the server saying? …I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. But I have — I have confidence in both parties. I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC? Where are those servers? They’re missing. Where are they? What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails? 33,000 emails gone, just gone.
Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking at a news conference, welcomed President Trump to the World Cup hosts club and handed him a soccer ball.
Russia just hosted the World Cup this year. In 2026, the US, Mexico and Canada will host the championship.
Trump accepted the ball and tossed it to first lady Melania Trump.
“That will go to my son, Barron. We have no question. In fact, Melania, here you go,” Trump said as he gave her the ball.
Watch the moment:
Russian President Vladimir Putin said he will look into extraditing the 12 Russians indicted by a US grand jury last week — but added that he’s not familiar with the fully extent of the matter.
“I don’t know the full extent of the situation. President Trump mentioned this issue. I will look into it,” Putin said via a translator.
The Justice Department on Friday announced indictments against 12 Russian nationals as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, accusing them of engaging in a “sustained effort” to hack Democrats’ emails and computer networks.
Watch more:
President Trump insisted again today that there was no collusion and that he ran a “clean campaign.”
“There was no collusion at all. Everybody knows it,” Trump said.
He said special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election has had a “negative impact” on the US-Russia relationship.
“It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous what’s going on with the probe,” Trump said.
The President said he also discussed with Russian President Vladimir Putin that there was “zero collusion.”
President Donald Trump said on Monday he holds both the United States and Russia responsible for the breakdown in the relationship – adding Russia to the mix after he said earlier Monday US policies and the special counsel’s investigation were responsible.
Trump said he feels that the US and Russia have “both made some mistakes.”
Still, the US president again lambasted the special counsel’s investigation stemming from Russian interference in the 2016 election as “a disaster for our country.”
“I think that the probe is a disaster for our country. I think it’s kept us (the US and Russia) apart. I think it’s kept us separated,” Trump said.
A reporter just asked President Trump about comments he made describing Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “competitor.”
Here’s what Trump said:
President Donald Trump said Monday that he raised the issue of election interference during his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a topic, he said, where Putin “has an interesting idea.”
“I felt this was a message best delivered in person,” Trump said of bringing up the 2016 election interference.
He continued, “President Putin may very well want to address it and very strongly cause he feels very strongly about it and he has an interesting idea.”
He said the two leaders also discussed nuclear proliferation, the denuclearization of North Korea, and radical Islamic terrorism.
Putin said in his opening remarks that Trump brought up “so-called interference” during the meeting, noting that he “had to reiterate” that Russia had nothing to do with it.
President Trump said his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin had significantly improved the relationship between the two countries.
He that while the US-Russia relationship “has never been worse than it is now,” he believes that has now “changed” after his summit with Putin.
Trump also said he believes that diplomacy with Russia, while perhaps not politically popular, is necessary.
“Nothing would be easier than to refuse to meet, to refuse to engage,” Trump said. “But that would not accomplish anything.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, standing next to President Trump at a news conference, insisted that Russia “never interfered” with American affairs, including the 2016 presidential election.
Putin said Trump raised the issue, something the US President had promised to do.
“Once again, President Trump mentioned issue of the so-called interference of Russia with the American elections,” Putin said. “I had to reiterate things I said several times, including during our personal contacts, that the Russian state has never interfered and is not going to interfere in internal American affairs, including election process.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin said he expressed his concern over President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
“We also mentioned our concern about the withdrawal of the United States from the JCPOA,” Putin said. “Thanks to the Iranian nuclear deal, Iran began most controlled country in the world.”
Watch more:
Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking at a joint news conference, described his meeting with President Trump as frank and business-like. He said it was successful and they had a “fruitful round of negotiations.”
But Putin acknowledged the US-Russia relationship has been complicated.
Moments before President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin took the stage, a man was forcibly removed from the room. Watch how it unfolded below.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, it seems, knows how to play the waiting game.
The Kremlin leader arrived in Helsinki at around 1:00 pm local time, just around the time his summit with President Donald Trump was originally scheduled to start. Observers took note: Putin has a habit of keeping other dignitaries waiting.
In 2016, he arrived in Japan over two hours behind schedule for talks with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The year before, Pope Francis waited patiently for more than an hour at the Vatican for his Russian guest to arrive. And on more than one occasion, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko had to cool his heels while waiting for meeting with Putin to start.
But the record for waiting patiently for Putin may belong to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In 2014, amid the crisis over the Crimea annexation, Putin kept Merkel waiting in Milan for a meeting four hours later than originally scheduled.
Negotiating tactic? In fairness, Putin’s late start at the historic Helsinki summit may have one possible explanation: Sunday was the World Cup final in Moscow, marking the end of a month of celebrations around the tournament.
Putin had always been scheduled to arrive first in Helsinki, so Trump delayed his departure to the Presidential Palace to accommodate Putin’s tardiness. All told, the summit got started only an hour behind schedule.
President Trump and President Putin are now participating in what’s known as an expanded bilateral meeting and working lunch.
The meeting will be in the Hall of Mirrors Room at the Finnish presidential palace, which is just off the Gothic Hall where the two men just met one-on-one.
The delegations are seated at a long table. In the screenshot above, the US is on the left; the Russians on the right.
With Trump are Fiona Hill, who is on the National Security Council; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; translator Marina Gross, who has previously translated for the State Department and other government entities; US Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman; and national security adviser John Bolton. Chief of Staff John Kelly is seated at the front end of the table (he’s partially out of frame in the photo above).
President Trump just responded to a shouted question asking how was the meeting.
Trump said it was a “very good start.”
President Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are meeting on one very hot Helsinki day.
The city is currently experiencing its worst heat in several years, and potentially the hottest day since 2010. It is currently 30 degrees Celsius (That’s 86 degrees Fahrenheit).
How rare is that? Helsinki averages around one 30°C day every decade, according to the Finnish Meteorological Institute.
The average high in Helsinki for mid-July is about 20 degrees Celsius, or about 68 degrees Fahrenheit.
A war of words erupted in the run-up to today’s highly anticipated conclave between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
First, it was a “meeting”: President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the possibility of meeting at the White House during a phone call last month, the White House said in April.
“As the President himself confirmed on March 20, hours after his last call with President Putin, the two had discussed a bilateral meeting in the ‘not-too-distant future’ at a number of potential venues, including the White House,” White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah said in a statement.
US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s one-on-one meeting — with interpreters — is running long.
Reporters were ushered out of the room where the two men were meeting at 2:16 p.m. local time, presumably leaving Trump and Putin alone for their 90 minutes of scheduled solo time. As of this writing, the meeting is still ongoing.
Trump and Putin’s bilateral meeting at the G20 summit last year also ran long, with first lady Melania Trump reportedly poking her head in the meeting in an attempt to get Trump back on schedule.
The office of Finland’s President Sauli Niinistö tweeted this photo of the Finnish leader posing with Presidents Trump and Vladimir Putin.
Finland has a long history of hosting diplomatic meetings: The country’s historical neutrality and its proximity to Russia made it a choice venue for Cold War era summits.
President Trump has his own interpreter in the room for the during his meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, a White House official confirms to CNN.
The interpreter is Marina Gross, who has previously translated for the State Department and other government entities. She accompanied first lady Laura Bush to Sochi, Russia, in 2008.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are also holding talks in Helsinki, both sides said Monday.
The parallel meeting is their first since the appointment of Pompeo as Secretary of State.
Vladimir Putin gave a brief statement in Russian when he posed with President Trump for a photo before their meeting.
Here’s the translation:
“Distinguished president, I am delighted to be able to meet you here in Finland. We have been in continual contact by telephone since the last time, and obviously the time has come to have a business-like conversation because there is so much happening in the world that we need to talk about.”
A US official is laying out three reasons the White House asked the Russian side for the extended one-on-one meeting between Trump and Putin to launch the summit.
The official said the request was made during the initial talks to set up the meeting over the course of the past few months.
President Trump just spoke ahead of his meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Here are the key takeaways:
Trump did not say he would address Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US election, which critics have called an act of war.
Putin also offered remarks through a translator, but they were not immediately audible.
President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin just met ahead of their one-on-one. They are making statements.
President Trump has been huddling with his advisers this morning — for longer than expected, given Putin’s delay — and one thing that is not on the planned agenda for today’s meeting is halting military maneuvers in the Baltics.
A US official tells CNN “at least that’s the plan going in,” referring to the joint US-NATO military exercises.
This, is course, is one of the questions hanging over the summit, given Trump’s abrupt decision last month in Singapore to halt military maneuvers over the Korea peninsula after his meeting with Kim Jong Un.
But the US official also acknowledges that things could always change after the one-on-one meeting between Trump and Putin.
Days ago, Trump said he wouldn’t rule out stopping the military exercises if Putin requested it.
President Donald Trump arrived Monday afternoon at the Finnish presidential palace in Helsinki for his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He was greeted at the door to the palace by the Finish president, about 20 minutes after Putin arrived via the same entrance.
The summit was already running about 45 minutes behind schedule on Monday after Putin arrived late at Helsinki’s airport.
Trump was held at his hotel while he waited for Putin, who is known for arriving late to important events, to touch down – drawing comparisons to Trump’s late arrivals at recent summits with US allies.
CNN producer Sebastian Shukla counted 20 cars including an ambulance in Putin’s motorcade, and 29 in President Trump’s. Both men drove straight under a tarpaulin marquee and into a small courtyard inside the palace upon arriving.
Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs says it agrees with President Trump’s comment that relations between the two countries have never been worse as a result of “U.S. foolishness” and the “witch hunt.”
Trump made the comments on Twitter ahead of his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Here’s the tweet:
Russian President Vladimir Putin has finally arrived at the presidential palace in Helsinki, Finland, more than 30 minutes later than previously scheduled.
President Trump is waiting at his hotel and is expected to arrive about 10 minutes after Putin.
Trump can find a mean word to say about almost anyone: The Pope, a Gold Star family, Arizona Sen. John McCain, and on and on and on.
One person appears to be an exception to that rule: Vladimir Putin.
Time and time again over his nearly 18 months in office, Trump has resisted saying anything bad about Putin. His critics say that’s particularly odd given that Russia conducted a broad and deep attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Here are 11 times the US President has praised his Russian counterpart.
Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat welcomed Presidents Trump ad Putin to Helsinki with hundreds of billboards highlighting the importance of a free press.
The billboards were written in both English and Russian.
The Newspaper’s Editor-in-Chief, Kaius Niemi, said in a Tweet Saturday:
“As we welcome the presidents to the summit in Helsinki, we @hsfi want to remind them of the importance of free press. 300 billboards on the routes from the airport to the summit are filled with news headlines regarding presidents’ attitude towards the pressfreedom. #HELSINKI2018”
Across Helsinki, other activist groups also unfurled banners for the summit. Here’s one from Greenpeace:
President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin were scheduled to have their official greeting at 1:10 p.m. local time (That’s 6:10 a.m. ET).
But as 1 p.m., Putin’s plane was still taxiing on a Finnish runway.
“It is quite stunning to see that plane just taxiing down the runway,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins said. “I’m guessing (Putin) is going to be a little bit late, but it’s just stunning to see the leader of country that is currently gripped by economic sanctions, a country that is being blamed for the nerve agent on a foreign soil … And here he is keeping the leader of the free world waiting.”
He’s now on his way to the meeting site. It’s now scheduled for 1:20 p.m. local.
Watch more:
President Trump sat down with ITV’s Piers Morgan as he left London Friday evening, and told the British interviewer why he was meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“If we can get along with Russia that’s a good thing. I don’t know him, I met him a few times. I think we could probably get along pretty well,” he said. “It’s too early to say if we’re friends or enemies. But getting along with Russia and China and all of these other places. That’s good, not bad.”
Watch a clip:
Meanwhile, Melania Trump and the Finnish First Lady Jenni Haukio met in Helsinki Monday morning.
Who is to blame for the dismal state of relations between the United States and Russia?
According to Trump, the US special counsel’s investigation into Russian 2016 election interference is responsible for the steep decline in relations.
But while US officials have stressed the path to improving US-Russia ties runs through a clear-eyed understanding of Russian aggression and the root causes of discord in the relationship, Trump has signaled in the lead-up to the summit he finds previous US administrations and law enforcement – not Putin – accountable for the breakdown.
Just hours before the summit was due to start, Trump named the European Union, Russia and China as foes to the United States during an interview at his golf club in Scotland.
“I think we have a lot of foes,” Trump told CBS News in an interview segment that aired Sunday on “Face the Nation.” “I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade. Now you wouldn’t think of the European Union, but they’re a foe.”
The President added that “Russia is a foe in certain respects. China is a foe economically, certainly they are a foe. But that doesn’t mean they’re bad. It doesn’t mean anything. It means that they are competitive. They want to do well and we want to do well.”
Trump’s actions in the last week have only amplified concerns about his approach to Russia. During his swing through the NATO summit in Brussels and his first official visit the United Kingdom, Trump repeatedly criticized US allies and criticized the Obama administration rather than Russia in the wake of the Justice Department’s indictment of 12 Russian agents.
Asked whether he would raise the issue of the 12 Russian military intelligence agents indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Friday for meddling in the 2016 election, Trump told CBS News: “Well, I might.”
“I hadn’t thought of that, but certainly I’ll be asking about it,” he added.
Trump told CBS that he is going into the meeting with Putin with “low expectations,” but repeated that he thinks it’s “a good thing to meet.”
Trump kicked off Monday morning in Helsinki by joining Finnish President Sauli Niinistö for breakfast, at his official residence Mäntyniemi.
Asked about his message for the Russian President, Trump said, “You’ll be seeing in a little while,” adding, “We’ll do just fine, thank you.”
Trump thanked his Finnish hosts, saying the US “very highly (respects) your country” and that he enjoyed spending time with Niinistö at last week’s NATO meeting.
“NATO has never been stronger,” Trump said. “Was a little bit tough at the beginning and it turned out to be love,” he said, adding that the meeting “brought everybody together.”
The top Democrats in Congress called for Trump to cancel his summit with Putin after the Justice Department announced indictments against 12 Russian nationals, that accused them of engaging in a “sustained effort” to hack Democrats’ emails and computer networks.
These are some of the Democratic lawmakers who said the meeting should have been quashed:
The call to cancel the summit came after a week in which Democrats have expressed widespread concerns about Trump’s ability to sit down and challenge Putin in a one-on-one meeting.
The Justice Department indicted 12 Russian nationals as part of Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, accusing them of engaging in a “sustained effort” to hack Democrats’ emails and computer networks.
The indictments could come up at today’s meeting between Trump and Putin.
Here’s what you need to know about the indictments:
President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki today, days after the Justice Department indicted 12 Russian officers for hacking.
Here’s what we know about the meeting and how it could go down:
