bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

paywallTypes

createdDate

publishedDate

sponsorType

urlAlias

moreOnThisArticles

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

articleSpeeches

socialHeadline

headline

images

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

Reuters

US President Donald Trump, who is fighting off allegations of ties between his election campaign and Moscow, said he would invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to the White House but that now was not the right time for that.
“I don’t think this is the right time, but the answer is yes, I would,” Trump said when asked if he would extend such an invitation to the Russian leader.
He was speaking to reporters on Air Force One during a flight from the United States to France in comments released by the White House on Thursday.
The Republican president drew criticism last week from Democrats who accused him of not pressing Putin hard enough at a meeting they held in Germany over Moscow’s alleged interference in the 2016 US presidential campaign.
After lots of smoke, finally some fire - and at the centre of it is Donald Trump Jnr
Accusations that Moscow meddled in the election and colluded with the Trump campaign have dominated Trump’s first months in office. Russia denies meddling, and Trump says there was no collusion.
Trump said in an interview on Wednesday that he had asked Putin if he was involved in Russian interference in the campaign. Trump said he spent the first 20 or 25 minutes of his more than two-hour meeting with Putin last Friday in Hamburg on the subject.
“I said, ‘Did you do it?’ And he said, ‘No, I did not. Absolutely not.’ I then asked him a second time in a totally different way. He said absolutely not,” Trump said.


US intelligence agencies said earlier this year that Russia sought to help Trump win the election by hacking private emails from Democratic Party officials and disseminating false information online.
US House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan on Thursday urged Trump’s eldest son to testify to a congressional committee about the alleged links between Trump’s election team and Russia.
Emails reveal Trump Jnr was offered Kremlin help to defeat Clinton. ‘I love it’, he replied
If he testified, Donald Trump Jnr would be the first member of the president’s inner circle of relatives and White House aides to give testimony to congressional investigations into the Russia allegations.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, a Republican, planned to send a letter on Thursday to the younger Trump to ask him to appear before his committee in a public session, CNN reported.
Ryan, the top-ranking Republican in Congress, told a news conference he supported that.
“I think any witness who’s been asked to testify in Congress should do that,” Ryan said.


Trump Jnr disclosed this week that he had met with a Russian lawyer last year who was said to be offering damaging information on Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton.
Trump Jnr eagerly agreed to meet the lawyer, who he was told by an intermediary was part of Moscow’s official support for his father’s campaign, according to emails the son released this week.
The emails were the most concrete evidence that Trump’s campaign might have been willing to accept Russian help to win the election, a subject that has also prompted an investigation by a federal special counsel.
Outraged Republicans want answers from Trump Jnr, while some Democrats talk of ‘treason’
Asked on Wednesday if he knew his son was meeting with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in June last year, the president said: “No, that I didn’t know until a couple of days ago when I heard about this.”
He later told reporters on Air Force One that “in fact maybe it was mentioned at some point,” referring to the meeting, adding he was not told it was about Clinton.


Senator Ron Wyden, a Democratic member of the intelligence committee, said it was odd that senior members of Trump’s campaign attended the meeting but that Trump himself said he knew nothing about it until recently.
“How is it plausible that nobody told then-candidate Trump about it? We’ve got to ask about this. We’ve got to get to the bottom of it,” Wyden told reporters.
Kremlin-linked lawyer who met Donald Trump Jnr ‘promised dirt on Clinton’
Trump said in Paris on Thursday that the lawyer was a private attorney and not a Russian government lawyer, and that nothing of substance came of the meeting.
“My son is a wonderful young man. He took a meeting with a Russian lawyer, not a government lawyer but a Russian lawyer. It was a short meeting. It was a meeting that went very, very quickly, very fast,” he said at a joint news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron.


Trump said it was normal in US politics for campaign teams to look into allegations about their opponents, as his son agreed to do before the meeting in June 2016.
Watchdog groups filed a complaint against Donald Trump Jnr, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and former campaign chief Paul Manafort on Thursday with the Federal Election Commission, which oversees elections, arguing the three violated the law by meeting with the Russian.
Donald Trump may have raised election interference with Vladimir Putin but how hard did he press him?
Separate from the complaint, the Federal Election Commission, frequently criticised as being paralysed by partisan deadlock, declined on Thursday to conduct a review of foreign interference in the 2016 election. The five-member commission’s three Republicans said they could not support moving forward because not all the facts were available.


The Russia allegations forced US Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from the federal investigation into Russian meddling in the election after media reports revealed he held undisclosed meetings with the Russian ambassador to Washington, Sergei Kislyak.
Sessions, who testified to Congress in June about his dealings with Russian officials, released a government form on Thursday dealing with contacts he has had with foreign nationals, including Russian government officials, but much of it was redacted.


India’s Modi hails ‘great news’ after US slashes tariffs as part of new trade deal

Pentagon ditches Harvard as Hegseth declares university too ‘woke’

Hong Kong summons Panama envoy over court ruling on CK Hutchison ports concession

As traditional US allies hedge their bets, will China be the one to cash in?

Donald Trump

Trump will invite Putin to White House, but just not right now

US President Donald Trump and Russia's President Vladimir Putin shake hands during a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, on July 7, 2017. Trump said he would invite Putin to visit the White House, but now was not the time to do so. Photo:AFP

News

World

United States & Canada

Russia & Central Asia