President Donald Trump has asked that Russian leader Vladimir Putin be invited to Washington this fall, the White House said Thursday.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in a tweet said that during Trump’s visit with Putin in Helsinki, Finland, on Monday, Trump “agreed to ongoing working level dialogue between the two security council staffs” of the United States and Russia.
Trump asked National Security Advisor John Bolton “to invite President Putin to Wahsington in the fall and those discussions are already underway,” Sanders tweeted.
Trump has been criticized by both Democrats and Republicans since Monday for his performance at a press conference with Putin.
Trump refused during that question-and-answer session to call out Putin for what U.S. intelligence agencies have said was Russian interference with the 2016 presidential campaign through cyberhacking and other means.
Despite that blowback, Trump, in his own tweets earlier Thursday, had said that he “looked forward” to a second sitdown with Putin. Those tweets had not mentioned the locale for that second round of talks.
