White House national security adviser John Bolton announced Wednesday that President Trump will delay meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin for a second summit meeting until special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia concludes.
“The president believes that the next bilateral meeting with President Putin should take place after the Russia witch hunt is over, so we’ve agreed that it will be after the first of the year,” Bolton said in a statement, according to the White House.
That’s a change from last week, when White House press secretary Sarah Sanders announced that Trump and Putin could meet in Washington as soon as later this year. The comments came after Trump and Putin met in Helsinki earlier this month.
“In Helsinki, @POTUS agreed to ongoing working level dialogue between the two security council staffs,” Sanders tweeted last week.
“President Trump asked @Ambjohnbolton to invite President Putin to Washington in the fall and those discussions are already underway,” she added.
[Opinion: Trump-Putin the sequel would be worse than the original]
Trump made waves during his first summit meeting with Putin when he indicated he doesn’t believe his own intelligence officials about Russia’s election meddling, but later clarified that he does believe that assessment.
Trump initially said during a joint press conference that he had no reason not to believe Putin, who stressed to him that the Russian government was not to blame for interference in the election — comments that were at odds with a January 2017 report from the U.S. intelligence community that found Russian agents were responsible for interfering in the election.
Trump later admitted that he misspoke when he said he didn’t “see any reason why” Russia would have meddled in the 2016 election, noting he believes the U.S. intelligence community assessment.
Mueller is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin. However, it’s not entirely clear when that investigation will end, and some have suggested it could linger well into 2019.
