‘Time to move forward’ on Russia, Trump says, as criticism intensifies

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump tried without success on Sunday to put the matter of Russia's election meddling behind him, insisting that he had "strongly pressed" President Vladimir Putin on the matter twice in a private meeting last week and declaring that it was "time to move forward."

But if Trump believed his willingness to raise the election interference directly with Putin would quiet questions about whether he could be trusted to stand up to Moscow — an issue that has shadowed his presidency — he grappled instead Sunday with the reality that the meeting might have raised more suspicions than it quelled.

Lawmakers in both parties said Trump had appeased the Russian president by failing to insist that he was responsible for the breach or threaten any consequences, and empowered him by appearing willing to partner on a cybersecurity effort to prevent future incursions.

"You are hurting your ability to govern this nation by forgiving and forgetting and empowering," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said of Trump, calling his meeting with Putin "disastrous."

"The more he talks about this in terms of not being sure, the more he throws our intelligence communities under the bus, the more he's willing to forgive and forget Putin, the more suspicion," Graham added in an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press." "And I think it's going to dog his presidency until he breaks this cycle."

As if to underscore the point, the White House confronted reports later Sunday that Donald Trump Jr., Trump's eldest son, was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer at Trump Tower during the campaign last year. The accounts of the meeting, by three White House advisers briefed on it and two others with knowledge of it, represent the first public indication that at least some people in Trump's campaign were willing to accept Russian help.

Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, had played down that meeting during an appearance on "Fox News Sunday," calling it a "nothing meeting," and a "big nothing burger."

Trump's account of his lengthy and closely scrutinized closed-door meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting came in a series of Twitter posts the morning after he had returned from the gathering in Hamburg, Germany. They appeared to be an attempt to move beyond the controversy after Moscow characterized the election discussion as a meeting of minds rather than a showdown between the American president and his Russian counterpart.

Administration officials knew that Trump's much-anticipated meeting with Putin was risky and in some ways a no-win situation. The tangle of investigations into his campaign's possible dealings with Russia raised the stakes and created a damaging backdrop for Trump, while Putin's well-earned reputation for outfoxing and manipulating adversaries suggested that he would stage manage the meeting for maximum advantage, making himself appear to have the upper hand.

On Sunday, it appeared that Putin had to some degree succeeded in doing just that, after Trump's refusal to answer questions about the encounter essentially ceded the narrative to Putin.

Trump broke with tradition and declined to hold a news conference at the end of the G-20 summit meeting, instead sending three top officials to brief a small group of reporters on Air Force One as he was returning on Saturday to Washington. None of them would address the claims of Putin and Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, that Trump had seemed satisfied with Putin's denial of involvement in the hacking.

Trump's tweets on Sunday did little to dispel the notion that he had backed down on the election meddling issue. He characterized his position as an "opinion" and asserted that he was prepared to team with Moscow — which U.S. intelligence agencies say carried out a large-scale effort to interfere with American democracy last year, and will try to again — on forming an "impenetrable Cyber Security unit" to thwart future breaches.

"I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election," Trump said in one post. "He vehemently denied it. I've already given my opinion."

"We negotiated a ceasefire in parts of Syria which will save lives," Trump continued in another message. "Now it is time to move forward in working constructively with Russia!"

Trump's highlighting of the potential cybersecurity initiative with Moscow — which he backed away from hours later in a tweet that said it would never happen — prompted derision from Republicans and Democrats who said Russia was the last country the United States should trust on such matters.

"I am sure that Vladimir Putin could be of enormous assistance in that effort, since he's doing the hacking," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

Rep. Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif., and the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, called the idea "dangerously naive."

"I don't think we can expect the Russians to be any kind of a credible partner in some cybersecurity unit," he said on CNN's "State of the Union." "If that's our best election defense, we might as well just mail our ballot boxes to Moscow."

Trump appeared to abandon the idea Sunday night, saying on Twitter that while he had discussed a cybersecurity unit with Putin, it "doesn't mean I think it can happen. It can't." He noted again that a cease-fire in a part of southwestern Syria that was discussed at the meeting had gone into effect Sunday, an apparent effort to show concrete results from the discussion.

Trump has dispatched administration officials to defend his performance at the meeting. On Sunday, Priebus flatly said Lavrov's version was "not true," and described a confrontational meeting between the two presidents, saying that Trump "absolutely did not believe the denial of President Putin."

"This was an extensive portion of the meeting," Priebus said of the election interference discussion.

Senior administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they did not have authorization to talk about the private meeting, have said the discussion of the election interference occupied about 40 minutes of the 135-minute discussion.

In separate interviews that aired over the weekend, Nikki Haley, the U.N. ambassador, said Putin's description of the meeting was an attempt to obfuscate.

"This is Russia trying to save face, and they can't," she said on CNN's "State of the Union." "Everybody knows that Russia meddled in our elections."

In a brief question-and-answer session aboard Air Force One as Trump returned from the summit meeting on Saturday, senior officials did not address or dispute the Russian version of events. But Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said three times that Trump had handled the meeting "brilliantly" and had "made his position felt."

"After a very substantive discussion on this, they reached an agreement that they would start a cyberunit to make sure that there was absolutely no interference whatsoever, that they would work on cybersecurity together," Mnuchin said. "And President Trump focused the conversation on Syria and the Ukraine and North Korea."

But Putin, a former KGB agent and a martial arts master, showed none of Trump's reluctance to answer questions about the meeting. At his news conference on Saturday, he told reporters that Trump had asked about election interference repeatedly and "agreed" with his statements about it.

"When possible, I answered his questions in detail," Putin said. "I got the impression that my answers satisfied him."

Given Trump's past questioning of the extent of Russia's role — including in Warsaw the day before his meeting with Putin — that impression is likely to persist.

"He's worse off now, not better," said Michael A. McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia who served under President Barack Obama. "I don't think this meeting in any way advanced American national interests or took the air out of people's suspicions about Trump's relationship with Russia."