Instead, he clarified his initial remarks in a different way. But Trump demurred, implying it involved classified information, and talked instead about his deceased uncle, who was a professor of engineering at MIT and did some research related to nuclear energy.įinally, when asked about his remarks at Helsinki that were seen by many as denigrating the American intelligence community, Trump didn’t say he had misspoken, as Kellyanne Conway, in her 2022 memoir, says he told her. His former aides have publicly and privately said he was fixated on Moscow’s nuclear arsenal, including the large number of Russian nuclear weapons targeting the US. I tried to ask Trump what he thought about Russia’s nuclear capabilities. Trump insisted to me that while “I said nice things” about Putin, “I killed them with Nord Stream,” the German/Russian pipeline his administration sanctioned in 2019 until “Biden comes in and approves it.” (The Biden administration waived sanctions on the project in May 2021, and then, after Russia invaded Ukraine, reinstated the sanctions.) “Bolton was one of the dumber people, but I loved him for the negotiations,” he said, because “all these countries,” aware of Bolton’s hawkish views, “thought we were going to blow them up” when Bolton sat in on the negotiations. Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC host, saw the day’s events as affirmation of her having covered the Trump-Russia matter “more than anyone else,” because, as her blog pointed out, Americans were now “coming to grips with a worst-case scenario that the US president is compromised by a hostile foreign power.”įor his part, Trump, when asked about Helsinki in my interview, blasted Bolton. Trump flew home to Washington, and when aides talked to him the next day about the reaction, he said he meant the opposite.Ī clarification was released, but the cleanup was not enough for critics such as Roger Cohen, then a columnist at the Times, who wrote of the “disgusting spectacle of the American president kowtowing in Helsinki to Vladimir Putin.” Some outlets, like the Times, didn’t include his comments about “great confidence” in US intelligence in their stories, while others, such as the Post, did. The first remark received all the attention. Then, a bit later in his answer, he expressed “great confidence in my intelligence people.” After going on a tangent about the server at the DNC, Trump said, “I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia that did it. The president “remained unwilling or unable to admit any Russian meddling because he believed doing so would undercut the legitimacy of his election and the narrative of the witch hunt against him,” Bolton wrote in his 2020 memoir The Room Where It Happened.Īt a press briefing, the final question was whether US intelligence or Putin should be believed with regard to meddling in the 2016 election. In advance of the summit, Trump met with his national security adviser, John Bolton, to discuss how to deal with Russian meddling. Trump, in July 2018, finally had a summit meeting with Vladimir Putin, the man he mistakenly claimed in 2015 to have met years earlier and his supposed puppet master, according to Steele’s dossier. Chapter 4: Helsinki and the $3,000 Russian disinformation campaign
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