The first thing President Trump asked Russian President Vladimir Putin during their two-hours-plus meeting at the G-20 summit on Friday was about whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election, according to a report Saturday.
“I’m going to get this out of the way: Did you do this?”, Trump asked Putin, according to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the only other American official in the room. Tillerson told an associate, according to the New York Times, that he was surprised by how blunt Trump’s first question was, even though the secretary of state had reportedly pressed Trump to push the issue hard.
All told, Trump spent about 40 minutes of their meeting exploring the election meddling issue with Putin, a senior White House official brief on the discussion told the Times. The report described the discussion as getting heated at times, with Putin demanding proof of his involvement.
Though Trump has publicly waffled back and forth on how sure he feels about whether Russia is guilty of interference, multiple agencies in the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a report in January that Russia was indeed involved.
After the meeting, Putin, during a news conference at the end of the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, said that he thought Trump was “satisfied” with his denial of having any role in election interference. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a separate press conference that Trump “accepted” Putin’s assurances.
Tillerson, at a press conference of his own, provided a different account. He said that both leaders “agreed” the issue would be an obstacle to furthering U.S.-Russian relations. “The president was rightly focused on how do we move forward from what may be simply an intractable disagreement at this point,” Tillerson said.
