President Donald Trump has invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to Washington this autumn, the White House said on Thursday. The move is seen as a daring rebuttal to the torrent of criticism over Trump's failure to publicly confront Putin during their first summit for Moscow's interference in the 2016 election.
Four days after Trump stunned the world by siding with Putin in Helsinki over his intelligence agencies, the president asked national security adviser John Bolton to issue the invitation to the Russian leader, said White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders. (Did everyone forget Trump backtracking on his stand at Helinski once he was back in the comfort of the White House?)
What happened at Monday's one-on-one between the two world leaders with only interpreters present remained a mystery, even to top officials and US lawmakers who said they had not been briefed. Trump's director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, said in response to a question at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado: "Well, you're right, I don't know what happened at that meeting."
The coveted invitation was sure to be seen as a victory by Putin, whose last official visit to the United States was in July 2007, when he spent two days at the Bush family compound.
Both Trump and Putin earlier on Thursday praised their first meeting as a success and blamed forces in the United States for trying to belittle its achievements, Trump citing discussions on counterterrorism, Israel's security, nuclear proliferation, cyber attacks, trade, Ukraine, Middle East peace and North Korea.
In one Twitter post, Trump blamed the media. "The Summit with Russia was a great success, except with the real enemy of the people, the Fake News Media."
In Moscow, Putin said the Helsinki summit "was successful overall and led to some useful agreements" without elaborating on the agreements.
Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer criticized the invitation. "Until we know what happened at that two-hour meeting in Helsinki, the president should have no more one-on-one interactions with Putin. In the United States, in Russia, or anywhere else," he said in a statement.
Coats, who on Monday roundly defended the intelligence agencies' findings of Russian meddling, also advised against a one-on-one meeting with Putin, saying he "would look for a different way of doing it."
An official visit by a Russian president to the United States is a rare event: the last time was in June 2010 with Dmitri Medvedev, now Russian prime minister.
A senior White House official said Bolton extended the official invitation to Putin on Thursday via his Russian counterpart. No date has been set and it was unclear whether it would be timed for the U.N. General Assembly in late September.
