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 spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.
President Donald Trump has
invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to Washington this autumn, the White
House said on Thursday, a daring rebuttal to the torrent of criticism in the
United States over Trump’s failure to publicly confront Putin at their first
summit for Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 election.
What happened at Monday’s
one-on-one between Trump and Putin with only interpreters present remained a
mystery, even to top officials and U.S. lawmakers who said they had not been
briefed.
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 United States for trying to belittle its achievements, Trump citing
discussions on counterterrorism, Israel’s security, nuclear proliferation,
cyber attacks, trade, Ukraine, Middle East peace and North Korea.
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 United States, 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.”
An official visit by a
Russian president to the United States is a rare event: the last time was in
June 2010 with Dmitri Medvedev, now Russian prime minister.
A senior White House
official said Bolton extended the official invitation to Putin on Thursday via
his Russian counterpart. No date has been set and it was unclear whether it
would be timed for the U.N. General Assembly in late September.
Sources:Reuters
What Putin has over you will come out one day
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