US President Donald Trump defended his summit with Vladimir Putin, saying the meeting was “even better” than his talks with NATO allies.
A day after Trump received a barrage of bipartisan criticism for what many said was a failure to properly challenge Putin over Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election and to undermine the credibility of his own intelligence officials, the president began pushing back, saying he was putting the “pursuit of peace” before politics.
Before leaving Finland, he said that while he had great confidence in the US intelligence community, he was seeing not to exclusively focus on the past.
On Tuesday morning, hours before he was due to meet Republican senators at the White House where he was likely to pressed on his meeting with Putin, the president tweeted once again.
“While I had a great meeting with NATO, raising vast amounts of money, I had an even better meeting with Vladimir Putin of Russia,” he said.
“Sadly, it is not being reported that way – the Fake News is going Crazy.”
Trump’s meeting in Helsinki, or at least the press conference he delivered afterwards, received almost unanimous condemnation from politicians from both parties and swathes of the American media, even including broadcasters from Fox News.
Republican House Speaker said there was “no moral equivalence between the United States and Russia”, while Senator John McCain said Trump’s comments represented “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”
Trump’s former communications director Anthony Scaramucci, a man who was fired after ten days but who remains close to the president, told CNN: “He’s got to speak out about it, and he’s got to reverse course immediately.
“The optics of this situation are a disaster….If he doesn’t reverse course on this, he will eventually lose people who want to support him.”
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky was among the handful of Republicans, along with Vice President Mike Pence, to defend the president.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team
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