7/19/2018

2016 ELECTION/MEDIA/RUSSIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Trump sowed even more confusion on Wednesday [7-18-19] over his recent meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin, insisting after a day of conflicting statements about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election that he had actually laid down the law with Mr. Putin. But that statement was almost completely at odds with how the president has characterized the meeting with Mr. Putin on Monday [7-16-18] in Helsinki, Finland, and it contradicted an answer he appeared to give when asked earlier in the day if he believed Russia was still interfering in American elections and he said, ‘No.’ The White House claimed Mr. Trump had yet again been misunderstood. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the press secretary, said the president had said ‘no’ only to whether he would take questions during a cabinet meeting, not to whether Russia was still interfering. It was the second day of reversals and semantic hairsplitting in Mr. Trump’s statements about Russia — on Tuesday [7-17-18], he said that he had meant to say at a news conference in Helsinki that he disagreed with a statement by Mr. Putin, not that he agreed with it — and it only deepened the mystery of what exactly Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin had talked about during a two-and-a-half-hour session in Finland when only their interpreters were in the room with them.”

-Mark Landler and Eileen Sullivan, “Trump Says He Laid Down the Law in His Latest Account of His Meeting With Putin,” The New York Times online, July 19, 2018