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    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Trump's Two Hours Alone With Putin Still Rattling Washington

    Trump's Two Hours Alone With Putin Still Rattling Washington

    By Ros Krasny
    July 22, 2018, 10:44 AM EDT Updated on July 22, 2018, 12:17 PM EDT

    Potential follow-up summit in Washington gets thumbs-down
    Gowdy says White House invitations should be given to allies

    President Donald Trump’s one-on-one meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin continues to unsettle lawmakers and foreign policy experts, many of whom also gave the thumbs-down to a possible follow-up meeting at the White House.

    “We need to know everything, and the president’s national security team needs to know everything” about the leaders’ two-hour meeting in Helsinki on July 16, Susan Rice, national security adviser to President Barack Obama, said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.

    Rice said it was an “historic mistake” to allow Trump -- or any U.S. president -- to sit down with Putin without note-takers or aides present in the room. “We have no idea what transpired,” she said.

    “The Russians are feeding their line of what happened,” Rice said. “We are hearing no rebuttal or comment from the United States. Russia is dictating the public perception -- the global public perception of what transpired in that meeting, and we have no basis for countering it.”

    Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said on Thursday that he was unaware of what transpired in the private Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki.

    Interpreter Knows

    Only one other American heard the conversation between Trump and Russia’s president, an interpreter from the U.S. State Department. Republican lawmakers rejected a Democratic proposal to issue a subpoena for the translator to testify.

    Thomas Bossert, Trump’s former homeland security adviser, defended the president’s performance in Helsinki but criticized the Russian government’s readouts of the Trump-Putin meeting.

    “They didn’t agree on anything, unlike what’s been reported -- apparently by the Russian government -- in a way to mislead us,” Bossert, who left the White House in April, said on ABC without saying how he got information about the meeting.

    The potential for Trump to host Putin at the White House later this year for a follow-up summit drew bipartisan skepticism in the wake of last week’s meeting.

    Summit Part Two

    “In Helsinki, @POTUS agreed to ongoing working level dialogue between the two security council staffs,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a tweet Thursday. “President Trump asked @AmbJohnBolton to invite President Putin to Washington in the fall and those discussions are already underway.”

    While it can be valuable to meet with countries that are adversaries, issuing an invitation is different, Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, said on “Fox News Sunday.” Such invitations should be reserved for U.S. allies such as the U.K., Australia and Canada “who are with us day in and day out,” he said.

    “Russia is not our friend, and tried to attack us,” Gowdy said in reference to Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election. He termed evidence of those efforts “overwhelming” and said Trump “needs to say that and act like it.”

    ‘Red Carpet Treatment’

    Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey also questioned the plan to bring Putin to the White House.

    “We’re going to give him a red carpet treatment and invite him to Washington, to me that’s beyond comprehension,” said Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Trump instead “should be challenging” Putin, he said.

    Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said that if Putin comes to the U.S., it should be with new sanctions on the table “that would be a hammer over Russia’s head if they continued to interfere in the 2018 election.”

    “Do not meet with this guy from a position of weakness,” said Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

    Rice said she had no objection to engaging with Russia, including holding talks with Putin. Such events can be done discreetly, though, such as during pull-asides at multinational gatherings such as the G-20 or the United Nations General Assembly meeting, she said. “It didn’t need to be a standalone summit with all sorts of pomp and circumstance,” she said.

    “You must come prepared,” Rice said. “You must come to advance the United States’ agenda.”

    A majority of Americans -- 56 percent -- disapproved of Trump’s comments in Helsinki that cast doubts on the conclusions of U.S. intelligence, compared with 29 percent who approved, according to an ABC News/Washington Post survey released on Sunday.

    More broadly, 50 percent of those surveyed disapproved of Trump’s overall handling of the meeting, compared with 33 percent who approved. Some 47 percent said U.S. world leadership has become weaker under Trump versus 30 percent who said it’s stronger. The poll of 464 adults was conducted July 18-20 and had a sampling error of plus or minus 5.5 percentage points.

    — With assistance by Ben Brody, and Miles Weiss

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ing-washington
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  2. #2
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    LOL!! Blame the media for not knowing, Trump and Putin were at a Helsinki Press Conference for nearly an hour to answer any questions the US or world had about their Summit, but no one asked any questions about the Summit. They had planes to catch and finally left to catch them.
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