By Ros Krasny and Jennifer A. Dlouhy
Bloomberg News
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Trump administration dampened expectations for Monday’s meeting in Helsinki between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“It isn’t a summit,” Jon Huntsman, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I’ve heard it called a summit. It’s a meeting.”
Trump faces intensifying pressure after Friday’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers on charges of hacking computer systems of the Democratic Party, a state election board and a company supplying voter verification software. Some Republicans have urged Trump to forcefully confront Putin about the election meddling, while Democratic lawmakers urged the president to scrap the summit altogether.
John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, said it would be “silly” for Trump to demand extradition of the Russians, as some lawmakers and others have urged.
“I think it’s pretty silly for the president to demand something that he can’t get legally,” Bolton said on ABC’s “This Week.” “For the president to demand something that isn’t going to happen puts the president in a weak position, and I think the president has made it very clear he intends to approach this discussion from a position of strength.”
Bolton also said the U.S. is not looking for “concrete deliverables” from Putin. The meeting — Putin’s fourth with a U.S. president — would be “basically unstructured,” he said.
In an interview with CBS conducted Saturday and broadcast Sunday, Trump said he may ask Putin to extradite the 12 Russians. “Well, I might,” Trump said when asked about it. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Trump said he’s going into Helsinki with low expectations, according to an excerpt of the interview. “I’m not going in with high expectations.”
Huntsman, on “Fox News Sunday,” said he expects Russia’s “malign activity” in elections — including in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union — would be “one piece of”’ the agenda Monday.
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he’s wary of Trump meeting alone with Putin because the Russian president is a trained KGB agent and Trump is not known for his preparation.
“Frankly, I think he’ll take advantage of this president,” Warner said on CNN’s State of the Union” Sunday. “We need other individuals from his administration in the room so we know at least someone will press the Russians on making sure they don’t interfere in future U.S. elections.”
Trump promised Friday to “absolutely, firmly ask the question” about Russian involvement in the 2016 election. But he also downplayed expectations for a confession.
Trump previously has shown little appetite for pressing the issue. After meeting with Putin in Vietnam last November, he said he was done discussing it and that he believed the Russian leader’s denials were sincere.
Trump’s response to the indictments has focused not on Russia but on President Barack Obama’s handling of the issue. “These Russian individuals did their work during the Obama years,” Trump said on Twitter Saturday. “Why didn’t Obama do something about it? Because he thought Crooked Hillary Clinton would win, that’s why.”
In his CBS interview, Trump said the Democratic National Committee “should be ashamed of themselves for allowing themselves to be hacked.”
“They had bad defenses and they were able to be hacked. But I heard they were trying to hack the Republicans too. But — and this may be wrong — but they had much stronger defenses,” Trump said.
According to federal prosecutors, Russian spies first attempted to infiltrate email accounts tied to Clinton on the same day Trump encouraged Russia to produce emails from Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
