Trump says he ‘misspoke’ after Putin meeting, accepts Russian election meddling

At a joint news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin after a summit in Helsinki on Monday, Trump stunned politicians back home by shying away from criticizing Putin for Moscow’s efforts to undermine the election, contradicting the findings of American intelligence agencies. A Trump nominee, Coats, did not even wait for the president’s return.

Do you know the difference between the words “would” and “wouldn’t?” No?

In Putin’s native Russia, Komsomolskaya Pravda published the headline: “How yesterday’s handshake between Putin and Trump differed from last year’s”.

Greenwald also pointed out that the actual policies of the Trump administration are more confrontational toward Russian Federation than Obama’s.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaks in Oxon Hill, MD on February 27, 2015.

But the meeting is officially slated as a discussion on “tax reform 2.0”, as Mr. Trump pushes another GOP attempt to further lower tax burdens.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, meanwhile, called for immediate hearings with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other top officials to learn more about Trump’s one-on-one meeting with the Russian Federation leader.

“No negotiation is worth throwing your own people and country under the bus”, Fox anchor and Fox & Friends co-host Abby Huntsman wrote on Twitter.

Trump also claimed he misspoke when he told a joint news conference in Helsinki that he did not “see any reason why it would be” Russian Federation that meddled in the vote, appearing to take Putin’s word over that of his own intelligence agencies.

That was the broad consensus of national-security and intelligence veterans following a freakish press conference during which Trump stood next to Putin and spent more time denigrating his political opponents and intelligence agencies than he did a hostile foreign power.

He didn’t reverse other statements in which he gave clear credence to Putin’s “extremely strong and powerful” denial of Russian involvement, raised doubts about his own intelligence agencies’ conclusions and advanced discredited conspiracy theories about election meddling.

Trump’s approach to Putin is testing support even among some Republicans, with several speaking out to remind the president that Russian Federation is a long-time USA adversary.

“The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t, or why it wouldn’t be Russia” instead of “why it would”, Trump said, in a rare admission of error by the bombastic US leader. “There was no collusion with the campaign”.

Not all Republicans were angry with the president’s conduct in Helsinki.

For his part, Trump on Tuesday thanked Senator Rand Paul over his supportive remarks.

Putin said he wanted Trump to win the race against Democrat Hillary Clinton.

“This is truly the Trump derangement syndrome that motivates all of this”, the Kentucky Republican told CNN. “And, again, you’re talking about ratcheting up tensions recklessly between two countries that still have thousands of nuclear-tipped missiles pointed at one another’s cities with archaic Cold War trigger systems – it is really the height of reckless lunacy”.

Trump’s initial remarks Monday spurred a flurry of critical reactions from Republicans and Democrats, with some of the latter reacting to the press conference with calls for impeachment.

In a Tuesday tweet the President calls the Monday summit in Helsinki “even better” than his meeting with North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies last week in Brussels.

Asked for comment, respected Wits University worldwide relations visiting professor John Stremlau said US President Donald Trump had “a penchant for pettiness and unusual fixation with denigrating and dismissing virtually all actions by his predecessor”.

The great parlor game in Washington (and beyond) is to theorize why Trump is so incapable of speaking ill of Putin and so determined to make apologies for Russian Federation.