More than a day after the US President Donald Trump’s comments in Helsinki cooked up a storm over his failure to hold Russian President Vladimir Putin accountable for meddling in the 2016 US elections, POTUS tried to calm the waters by saying he misspoke in a joint news conference in Helsinki.
“I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t,’” Trump told reporters at the White House, more than 24 hours after his appearance with Putin. “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,” said Trump, according to a Reuters report.
ALSO READ: ‘I have GREAT confidence in MY intelligence people,’ says US Prez Trump
In a news conference held on Monday in Helsinki Trump, standing alongside Vladimir Putin, told reporters he was not convinced it was Moscow (that interfered with US election). “I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
Trump praised the Russian leader for his “strong and powerful” denial of the conclusions of US intelligence agencies that the Russian state meddled in the elections during news conference in Helsinki.
Not only did Trump shy away from criticizing Moscow’s actions to undermine the US election but he also cast a doubt on US intelligence agencies, prompting #Trumptreason on social media. Some US lawmakers even called for tougher sanctions and other actions to punish Russia.
More than 24 hours after making Helsinki, he said read mainly from a prepared statement, on Tuesday and said he had complete faith in US intelligence agencies and accepted their conclusions.
Although he faced pressure from critics, allied countries and even his own staff to take a tough line, Trump did not raise any issue with Moscow that have brought relations between the two nuclear powers to the lowest ebb since the Cold War. These include – NATO expansion, Russian annexation of the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and its military backing of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war.