Trump-Putin meeting: leaders hold summit in Helsinki

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are playing quite the game of geopolitical will-they-or-won’t-they.

On July 19, Trump told National Security Adviser John Bolton to invite Putin to the White House in the fall for a follow-up to this month’s now-infamous meeting in Helsinki. Putin played coy: He neither accepted nor declined the invitation right away; instead, he let five days go by, then had his aides suggest instead that maybe the two leaders could meet on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Argentina in November.

Vladimir Putin’s potential trip to Washington, DC, has been postponed.

National Security Adviser John Bolton said Wednesday that the prospective meeting with the Russian leader will be pushed from this fall to sometime in 2019.

An increasing number of Americans do believe, contrary to President Donald Trump’s wildly inconsistent statements and claims, that Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential election and that the interference affected the election’s outcome, according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.

By three different metrics, Americans’ belief that Russia meddled in the 2016 election — the consensus of the US intelligence community — is rising. The NBC/WSJ poll was conducted during and after Trump’s meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, when the president’s performance in a press conference was widely panned for his timidity in confronting Putin and his apparent willingness to believe Putin’s claims about the 2016 election over the findings of American intelligence.

United States Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman fired back at those calling for him to resign after President Donald Trump’s performance at the Helsinki summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying he’ll continue to serve and represent the US’s interests in this “fragile” moment.

Huntsman late Saturday wrote an op-ed explaining his reasoning in the Salt Lake Tribune, responding to a piece published earlier in the week by columnist Robert Gehrke in the same newspaper calling for him to step down. Huntsman’s brother, Paul Huntsman, bought the Salt Lake Tribune in 2016 and is its owner and publisher.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats is trying to downplay his surprised reaction to the news that President Donald Trump plans to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to the White House in the fall. He says his “awkward response” wasn’t meant to be critical of the president, who is continuing to face the fallout over his performance at Monday’s Helsinki summit.

He released a statement Saturday addressing his earlier remarks, capping off what’s been a weird week for Trump and Coats all around.

Here’s a headline that hasn’t aged so well: “The Surprising Promise of the Trump-Putin Summit.”

In Foreign Affairs, a mere week ago, the historian and former diplomat Michael Kimmage made the case that the real action at the Helsinki meeting would quite likely occur behind the scenes, in unglamorous conversations among midlevel diplomats, who would begin much-needed exchanges about thorny issues including Ukraine and Syria.

President Donald Trump just survived one of the most disastrous weeks of his presidency.

In the process, however, he demonstrated just how poorly he handles foreign policy issues — and undermined our persistent, misplaced hope that he will somehow do better.

Over the past 24 hours, a huge controversy erupted in Washington over whether President Donald Trump would agree to let the Russian government interrogate 11 Americans — including a former US ambassador to Moscow.

It all stems from an offer Russian President Vladimir Putin made to Trump during their meeting in Helsinki on July 16.

As seemingly every national political figure not already hopelessly in the tank for President Trump rushed Monday to denounce his disastrous press conference with Russian despot Vladimir Putin, few condemnations received as much attention as this one from former CIA Director John Brennan:

I don’t know why Trump and his team accepted, and at times actively solicited, the help of Putin and Russian intelligence in winning the 2016 election, and why they have appeared at times to actively serve Putin’s interests once in office. Maybe they were just taking whatever help they could get; maybe the pee tape is real; maybe Jon Chait’s theory is right and Trump has been a Soviet/Russian asset for three decades.

Donald Trump finds himself in perhaps the worst political position of his presidency, dragged down by a disaster made entirely by his own actions and inability to conduct himself in a manner that is remotely acceptable given the high office he holds.

In an effort to ameliorate the situation, Trump on Wednesday took the extraordinary-for-Trump (though normal for a normal president) step of sitting for a conventional interview with a non-propaganda television station, taking questions from CBS News’s Jeff Glor. And while the performance narrowly addressed the core issue — Trump’s on-again, off-again refusal to say that Russian hacking in the 2016 election happened and was bad — it mostly served to underscore how profound a crisis America faces.

On Wednesday, a reporter asked President Donald Trump if thought Russia was still targeting the United States. He responded with a terse, but clear, answer: “No.”

The president’s response openly and directly contradicts the repeated statements of his spy chief and other top national security officials — and raises the question of how seriously Trump believes the conclusions of his own intelligence agencies.

President Donald Trump claimed he misspoke about whether he thought Russia meddled in 2016 presidential elections — and Twitter is having a field day with it.

Here’s what happened: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump met in Helsinki on Monday, where Putin publicly denied claims that Russia had interfered in the 2016 US presidential election.

Democrats and Republicans agree that something needs to be done about Russia in the wake of this week’s shocking Trump-Putin summit and the president’s baffling subsequent walkback of his comments. But few can agree on what exactly that should be, which probably means any efforts are doomed to failure.

So far, members of both parties have widely condemned Trump’s press conference on Monday and expressed support for a hearing with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

President Trump walked back his Putin press conference comments on Tuesday, claiming that his grammar was incorrect and he meant to say he didn’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia meddling in US elections.

But on Tuesday night, Trump somewhat undermined his scripted apology, tweeting that the meeting between “President Putin and myself was a great success, except in the Fake News Media!”

President Donald Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday to discuss relations between the two countries. The press conference that followed was striking. Asked to denounce Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump changed the subject to Hillary Clinton’s emails. Trump refused, despite being asked multiple times, to criticize Putin, blamed the US for tensions with Russia, and repeatedly criticized the investigation into whether his campaign colluded with Russia in 2016.

A rush transcript of the press conference follows.

President Donald Trump really wants to emphasize that, according to him, there was “no collusion” with Russia during the 2016 presidential election.

After his press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday, Trump gave a prepared statement to reporters during a meeting with members of Congress to clarify a few things — including saying that he does believe the US intelligence community’s assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

When my son and his toddler friends misbehave and fight on the playground, the parents usually make the kids apologize even if it’s totally insincere just for the sake of establishing the precedent. In somewhat the same vein, President Donald Trump addressed the nation from the Oval Office on Tuesday to explain that he “misspoke” at his bizarre joint appearance with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday.

He says he actually never meant to cast doubt on the US intelligence community’s determination of Russia culpability for hacking the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s email account.

President Donald Trump just issued what was arguably the most bald-faced lie of his entire presidency — and that’s saying something.

Following massive bipartisan condemnation of Trump’s disastrous Monday press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, in which he questioned whether Russia was responsible for meddling in the 2016 US election, Trump held a surprise press appearance on Tuesday afternoon to try to walk back his comments.

To President Donald Trump’s most ardent defenders in the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, the biggest problem with Trump’s press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin was the press.

“Given the unfriendliness of the press to the president, why should we concentrate on the press conference?” Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) said at a press event Tuesday. “The summit in fact had the two world superpowers sit down and discuss in a civilized way for two hours privately, then two hours with staff, the wide gamut of issues that are important to this world. I call that a success. A successful summit.”

The US ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman Jr., is facing calls to resign from his position after Monday’s meeting between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

One particularly strong request came in the form of a column in a newspaper owned and published by Huntsman’s brother.

President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday morning, in which Trump provided cover for Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, elicited some heated criticism from leading Republicans in Congress. This prompted an obvious question: Would Republicans put their money where their mouth is and actually use their power to punish Trump?

Well, House Speaker Paul Ryan was asked that question at Tuesday presser — and he made it clear the answer was no, at least as far as the GOP leadership was concerned.

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press conference on Monday after their meeting in Helsinki was, by many accounts, a disaster.

But that’s not even the worst part.

We don’t talk about it very much, but President Donald Trump is a hardcore vaccine truther. He has sent more than 20 tweets over the past several years propagating the myth that vaccines cause autism and suggesting doctors should cut down on the number of vaccinations they give to young children.

This may seem totally disconnected from Trump’s shameful press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, but it isn’t. In fact, it’s vital to understanding Trump’s dangerous foreign policy. In both cases, the same specific kind of ignorance — a complete disinterest in understanding why things are the way they are — is leading Trump to advocate potentially deadly positions.

President Donald Trump’s pre-taped interview with personal cheerleader and Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday night mostly provided Trump a chance to defend — unchallenged — his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.

Trump tried to change the subject from Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election to the so-called “phony witch hunt” — Hannity and Trump’s preferred term for special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. There was also a bizarre comparison of Paul Manafort to Al Capone.

Top aides at the White House are peddling a remarkable excuse for President Donald Trump’s embarrassing performance at a press conference in Helsinki on Monday, where he sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin over American intelligence officials on the question of whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

The president, they tell Axios’s Jonathan Swan, is delusional: