Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says President Trump misspoke when he reluctantly admitted it's probable Vladimir Putin has ordered the assassination of opponents and those he's considered traitors like former spy Sergei Skripal.
“I wouldn’t make the assessment that Trump allowed that possibility and so on, as we’re reading in many media reports,” Dmitry Peskov said, according to Latvian-based news outlet Meduza.
“Here you’ve got to be very flexible with how you read the linguistic properties. It’s clear that there couldn’t have been a different answer,” the Kremlin spokesman said, adding that there was no credible proof implicating Putin in the Skripal case.
TASS:
"US President [Donald Trump] did not come up with any direct accusations [against the Russian leader in an interview with CBS News]," he noted. "Moreover, there can be no substantiated accusations against the Russian president."
Trump made his remarks in a wide-ranging interview on CBS News’s “60 Minutes.” Interviewer Lesley Stahl told Trump that he never criticized Putin publicly.
“Do you agree that Vladimir Putin is involved in assassinations? In poisonings?” Stahl asked.
“Probably he is, yeah. Probably. I mean, I don’t ...” Trump responded.
“Probably?” Stahl said.
“But I rely on them, it’s not in our country,” the president said, later adding that “of course they shouldn’t do it.”
Peskov also tried to reframe Trump's claim he had been very tough when he and Putin met one-on-one in Helsinki last July.
... Peskov told journalists on Monday that the meeting had not ventured outside the realm of “diplomatic politeness.”
TASS:
"All questions were put in a very straightforward manner. In this respect the meeting was really tough, because both presidents openly mentioned the irritants that exist in bilateral relations," Peskov said. "The problems were candidly called by their real names. In that sense the meeting was tough," he added. "As for the manner of the conversation - if he went beyond diplomatic politeness - well, he did not. Everything was within the established bounds."
He recalled that Putin himself told a news conference that the questions discussed at the summit had been in a very straightforward way.
Kremlin suggests Trump misspoke when he said Putin was involved in assassinations (WaPo)
Kremlin: Claims that Putin ‘involved’ in Skripal case are grossly invalid and groundless (TASS)
Kremlin assures Putin-Trump summit in Helsinki stayed within diplomatic boundaries (TASS)