US President Donald Trump said he might ask Russian President Vladimir Putin to extradite 12 Russian intelligence agents indicted on Friday for hacking Democratic e-mail accounts during the 2016 US presidential campaign, adding that he has “low expectations” for his summit with the Russian leader today.
Trump and Putin are meeting today in Helsinki, Finland, in a summit that the US president’s critics fear could lead to him relaxing US sanctions against Russia, recognizing Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, or other concessions.
“I go in with low expectations,” Trump said in excerpts of an interview with CBS News released yesterday. “I’m not going with high expectations.”
Photo: AP
A US grand jury issued an indictment against the agents on Friday, charging them with hacking into e-mail accounts controlled by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign.
The charges stem from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the election and any involvement by Trump’s campaign, a probe the US president has repeatedly derided as a “witch hunt.”
Trump was briefed on the indictments last week, but said in the interview he had not considered asking Putin to extradite the agents to the US.
“Well, I might,” Trump said after CBS News anchor Jeff Glor asked about it. “I hadn’t thought of that. But I certainly, I’ll be asking about it. But again, this was during the [former US president Barack] Obama administration. They were doing whatever it was during the Obama administration.”
Last month, Putin allowed that non-state actors in Russia — people he likened to “artists” — might have taken it upon themselves to launch the cyberattacks on Clinton’s campaign and the DNC.
“If they’re patriotically minded, they start making their contribution,” Putin told foreign journalists.
Trump has sought to turn blame on his predecessor, Obama, for Russia’s election attacks, saying in tweets on Saturday that the former US president did nothing to prevent it and little to punish Moscow afterward.
He told CBS News that the Democratic Party was also to blame for not better securing its computer equipment.
“The DNC should be ashamed of themselves for allowing themselves to be hacked,” Trump told Glor. “They had bad defenses and they were able to be hacked. But I heard they were trying to hack the Republicans too. But — and this may be wrong — but they had much stronger defenses.”
Trump said in the interview that “nothing bad” would come from the summit, and listed his recent meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
“I think it’s a good thing to meet. I do believe in meetings,” he said. “I believe that having a meeting with Chairman Kim was a good thing. I think having meetings with the president of China was a very good thing. I believe it’s really good. So having meetings with Russia, China, North Korea, I believe in it.”
“Nothing bad is going to come out of it, and maybe some good will come out,” Trump said.
Trump told Glor that he has not decided whether to meet alone with Putin to start their summit, as he said he would last week.
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