Trump plans to formally invite Putin to US later this year, White House says

Donald Trump has asked his administration to formally invite Russian president Vladimir Putin to visit Washington later this year, the White House announced on Thursday.

Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, said Trump asked his national security adviser John Bolton to extend the invitation to Putin for a “working level” dialogue between the two leaders.

In Helsinki, @POTUS agreed to ongoing working level dialogue between the two security council staffs. President Trump asked @Ambjohnbolton to invite President Putin to Washington in the fall and those discussions are already underway.

— Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) July 19, 2018

The invitation comes as the White House has faced a tumultuous week in the aftermath of Trump’s controversial summit with Putin in Helsinki.

Trump was roundly criticized from Democrats and Republicans in Washington for siding with the Kremlin over the judgments of US intelligence on whether Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. It took the president several attempts to walk back his comments, amplifying the fallout from his joint appearance with Putin.

Trump was nonetheless unfazed by the backlash, deeming the summit as a “great success” in a tweet earlier on Thursday while saying he looked forward to a second meeting with Putin.

“The Summit with Russia was a great success, except with the real enemy of the people, the Fake News Media,” Trump wrote.

“I look forward to our second meeting so that we can start implementing some of the many things discussed, including stopping terrorism, security for Israel, nuclear ... proliferation, cyber attacks, trade, Ukraine, Middle East peace, North Korea and more. There are many answers, some easy and some hard, to these problems...but they can ALL be solved!”

The news of Trump’s plan to host Putin for a meeting at the White House caught at least one of his own intelligence chiefs off guard.

Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, was informed of the announcement by MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell during an onstage interview at the Aspen Security Form in Colorado.

“Say that again?” Coats responded, prompting laughter from the crowd. “Did I hear that?”

“OK. That is going to be special,” he added.

Coats took the unusual step earlier this week of issuing a public statement countering Trump’s suggestion in Helsinki that Moscow was not responsible for meddling in the 2016 election.

Speaking in Aspen, Coats stood by his decision to contradict the president.
“I was just doing my job,” he said.

“As I expressed to the president on my third visit to the Oval Office as his adviser, I said: ‘Mr President, there will be times I have to bring news to you that you don’t want to hear. But know that it will to the best extent be unvarnished, non-politicized, and the best our incredible intelligence community can produce.’”

Coats went on to describe Russia as the most aggressive state actor attempting to interfere in US affairs. He also warned of the need to be “ever-vigilant” and “relentless.”

Coats continued: “And by the way, the former director of the KGB is the one leading their nation. I think that anybody that thinks Vladimir Putin doesn’t have his stamp on everything that happens in Russian is misinformed. It is very clear that virtually nothing happens there of any significance that Vladimir Putin doesn’t know about or hasn’t ordered.”

Ignoring the warnings of intelligence leaders, Trump has continued to lavish praise on Putin and has emphasized the need to improve US-Russia relations. It has remained unclear, however, what the president is seeking to accomplish from his negotiations with his Russian counterpart.

Prior to their joint press conference in Helsinki, Trump and Putin met behind closed doors for two hours with only their interpreters present. Little is known about what was discussed, prompting Democrats on Capitol Hill to demand that Trump’s national security team testify before Congress.

The controversy escalated on Wednesday, when Sanders told reporters Trump was entertaining a proposal from Putin that would allow special counsel Robert Mueller’s team to interrogate the 12 Russian military intelligence officials it indicted last week if, in exchange, the US allowed the Russian government to interrogate certain Americans, including the former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul.

Faced with yet another firestorm, the White House was later forced to undertake another course correction and on Thursday rejected the proposal in a public statement.