The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee criticized President Trump following his face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying he did not do enough to challenge Russian meddling in the election last year.
“We are told President Trump raised the subject of Russian interference in our 2016 presidential election,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said in a Friday statement, hours after the two leaders met for roughly two hours in Hamburg, Germany, during the G-20 summit meeting.
Warner added that “whatever” Trump actually told Putin, “it would have had much more force if just the day before President Trump had not equivocated about who was behind the unprecedented attack.”
When asked at a Thursday news conference if he could definitively say Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Trump said that “nobody knows for sure,” later adding, “I think it could very well have been Russia but I think it well could have been other countries and I won’t be specific.”
Trump also criticized the U.S. intelligence community, saying they were wrong about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the 2003 invasion toppled Saddam Hussein.
Warner took issue with these comments as well, saying whatever Trump told Putin “would also have had more force if he had not again criticized the integrity of our intelligence agencies, among whom there is unwavering agreement about Russia’s active [2016 election] interference.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee will carry on with its investigation into Russian meddling, Warner said, urging the Trump administration to let the panel do its job.
“[I]t is imperative that the Trump Administration refrain from any effort to relax or rescind the sanctions already in place,” Warner said, adding, “They also cannot seek to undermine congressional action toughening sanctions in response to Russia’s brazen assault on American democracy.”
According to U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Trump was the first to raise the topic of Russian meddling in the election.
“The president opened the meeting by raising the concerns of the American people regarding Russian interference in 2016 election. Putin denied such involvement, as he has done in the past,” Tillerson said during an off-camera briefing following the meeting.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov confirmed nearly simultaneously during a televised news conference that Trump brought up election interference, but added Trump accepted Putin’s “clear statements” that “Russian leadership hadn’t interfered.”
