AP: President Donald Trump says “nothing bad … maybe some good” will come out of Monday’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as he attempted to lower expectations for what the meeting may actually achieve. Trump’s national security adviser said they aren’t looking for “concrete deliverables.”
He also called the European Union a “foe” of the United States in an interview that aired Sunday. “I think we have a lot of foes,” Trump said. “I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade. Now, you wouldn’t think of the European Union, but they’re a foe.”
Trump has made comments in the past about the European Union and continued to name Russia and China as opponents in particular arenas of national activity.
Trump also says he “hadn’t thought” about asking Putin to extradite the dozen Russian military intelligence officers indicted this past week in Washington on charges related to the hacking of Democratic targets in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but says “certainly I’ll be asking about it.”
He blamed the Democratic National Committee for “allowing themselves to be hacked.”
The U.S. has no extradition treaty with Moscow and can’t compel Russia to hand over citizens, and a provision in Russia’s constitution prohibits extraditing its citizens to foreign countries.
Asked whether Trump would ask Putin to turn over the 12 military intelligence officials, U.S. national security adviser John Bolton called the idea “pretty silly” and said doing so would put the president in a “weak position.”
He said Trump is going into the summit with a stronger hand because of the indictments.
Trump and Putin have met twice before, during international summits last year in Germany and in Vietnam. But Jon Huntsman, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, says Monday’s meeting “is really the first time for both presidents to actually sit across the table and have a conversation and I hope it’s a detailed conversation about where we might be able to find some overlapping and shared interests.”
