Trump's Putin fallout: Inside the White House tumultuous week of walk backs
WASHINGTON - Executive time began early on Thursday, just after sunrise.
Feeling exasperated and feisty as he awoke in the White House residence, President Donald Trump firedoff his grievances on Twitter about how the media had been covering his Helsinki summit. And, refusing to be cowed, Trump gave national security adviser John Bolton an order: to schedule a second summit and officially invite Putin to visit Washington.
The two presidents had already discussed the likelihood of a follow-up meeting, but at Trump's direction Thursday morning, Bolton sprang into action to make it official, making an overture to the Kremlin. By midafternoon the White House announced that plans were underway for a fall summit in Washington.
The bulletin landed midway through a remarkably candid interview of Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats at the Aspen Security Forum that underscored the disconnect and tension on Russia policy between Trump and his administration. The intelligence chief criticized Trump's performance during the Helsinki summit and - taking a deep breath and then offering a prolonged grimace-laugh - made clear that he had no advance knowledge of the follow-up meeting with Putin.
"That's going to be special," Coats said wryly, as the crowd in Aspen, Colorado, rallied around him in sympathy for being left in the dark.
For Trump and his White House, the days that followed the Helsinki summit amounted to an unofficial Walk Back Week - a daily scramble of corrections and clarifications from the West Wing. Each announcement, intended to blunt the global fallout of the president's Russophilic performance in Helsinki, was followed by another mishap that only fueled more consternation.
Just as Trump prepared to decamp to his New Jersey golf course for the weekend and turn the page on a full week of Russia controversies, more bad news arrived Friday. Reports surfaced, first in The New York Times, that the FBI had a fall 2016 recording of Trump and his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, discussing payments to silence a former Playboy centerfold who alleged an extramarital affair with Trump.
This portrait of a tumultuous week in the White House amid growing concern over Trump's approach to Russia comes from interviews with a dozen administration officials and Trump confidants, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely recount private conversations.
The trouble started Monday in Helsinki, though the magnitude did not set in for Trump for several hours. He stepped offstage after his 46-minute, freewheeling news conference alongside Putin - in which he seemed to accept Putin's denial of Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election campaign over the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies - delighted with his own performance. The president felt he had shown strength, an impression buoyed by two friendly interviews he did with Fox News Channel personalities before boarding Air Force One to return home from the Nordic capital.
But roughly an hour into the flight, Trump's mood darkened and grim reality set in as he consumed almost universally negative cable news coverage and aides began reviewing pages upon pages of printed-out statements from fellow Republicans lambasting the president. Trump called his former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, to gripe, and he also huddled with White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in his cabin at the front of the plane to strategize.
Much of the initial scrutiny focused on Trump taking the side of Putin over his own intelligence community, so Trump and his aides first settled on the president's sending a tweet that reiterated, "I have GREAT confidence in MY intelligence people."
But that did not silence the uproar, and aides knew they had a big problem.
Trump himself was flummoxed. He waxed on about his impressions of Putin up close - strong, smart and cunning, in Trump's assessment - and told associates that he viewed the Russian as a formidable adversary with whom he relishes interactions. He also was furious with the negative media coverage of a summit that he felt had been a clear success. And he complained to some about what he viewed as an undercovered angle of the election controversy: That the Democratic National Committee allowed its server to be hacked.
Trump further grumbled about the tough question he was asked by Jonathan Lemire, an Associated Press correspondent, wondering why that reporter had been called on rather than someone who might have asked an easier question.
Lemire asked whether Trump would denounce Russia's election interference to Putin's face, "with the whole world watching," and the president demurred. Aides tried to explain to Trump that nearly any journalist would have asked a similarly pointed question in that moment.
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