Unbowed by swirling criticism of his summit encounter with Vladimir Putin, U.S. President Donald Trump swiftly invited the Russian leader to the White House this fall for a second get-together. Putin's ambassador to the U.S. said Moscow is open to discussing such a meeting, even as confusion abounds over exactly what they discussed the first time.
Cleanup has continued from Monday's two-hour private meeting in Helsinki, Finland, with Trump belatedly saying Putin's "incredible offer" of shared U.S.-Russia investigations was no good after all.
A White House meeting would be a dramatic extension of legitimacy to the Russian leader, who has long been isolated by the West for activities in Ukraine, Syria and beyond and is believed to have interfered in the 2016 presidential election that sent Trump to the presidency. No Russian leader has visited the White House in nearly a decade.Trump asked National Security Adviser John Bolton to invite Putin, and "those discussions are already underway," Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Thursday. Trump earlier had tweeted that he looked forward to "our second meeting" as he defended his performance at Monday's summit, in which the two leaders conferred on a range of issues including terrorism, Israeli security, nuclear proliferation and North Korea.
"There are many answers, some easy and some hard, to these problems ... but they can ALL be solved!" Trump tweeted.
In Moscow, Anatoly Antonov, Russian ambassador to the U.S., said it is important to "deal with the results" of their first summit before jumping too fast into a new one. But he said, "Russia was always open to such proposals. We are ready for discussions on this subject." The Kremlin has the final say, but hasn't responded yet to Trump's invitation.
The announcement came as the White House sought to clean up days of confounding post-summit Trump statements on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump's public doubting of Russia's responsibility in a joint news conference with Putin on Monday provoked withering criticism from Republicans as well as Democrats and forced the president to make a rare public admission of error.
Then on Thursday, the White House said Trump "disagrees" with Putin's offer to allow U.S. questioning of 12 Russians who have been indicted for election interference in exchange for Russian interviews with the former U.S. ambassador to Russia and other Americans the Kremlin accuses of unspecified crimes. Trump initially had described the idea as an "incredible offer."
The White House backtrack came just before the Senate voted overwhelmingly against the proposal. It was Congress' first formal rebuke of Trump's actions from the summit and its aftermath.
While they had met privately on three occasions in 2017, Trump opened the door to a potential White House meeting with Putin earlier this year. The Kremlin had said in April that the president had invited the Russian leader to the White House when they spoke by telephone in March. At the time, White House officials worked to convince a skeptical president that the Nordic capital would serve as a more effective backdrop — and warned of a firestorm should a West Wing meeting go through.
Still, Trump has expressed a preference for the White House setting for major meetings, including floating an invitation to Washington for North Korea's Kim Jong Un after their meeting in Singapore last month. Putin would be setting foot inside the building for the first time in more than a decade.
He last visited the White House in 2005, when he met President George W. Bush, who welcomed the Russian leader in the East Room as "my friend."
President Barack Obama welcomed then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to the White House in 2010, and took him on a burger run at a joint just outside the capital. Putin, in his first public comments about the summit, told Russian diplomats that U.S.-Russian relations are "in some ways worse than during the Cold War," but that the meeting with Trump allowed a start on "the path to positive change."