The New Yorker details the events surrounding President Trump's inviting Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet with him in Washington, and how the president's national security team is not happy about having to follow through on the offer.
An excerpt:
There is one nation conspicuously missing from Trump’s long list of upcoming deadlines and deals, but it has proved to be the most divisive one of all: Russia. Amid the metastasizing investigations of his campaign and business ties to Russia, Trump talks and tweets about the country more than ever these days, denying any knowledge of Russia’s 2016 election meddling on his behalf while leaving his true intentions opaque. He brags of being tougher than any other President toward Vladimir Putin one minute, then laments the lack of good relations the next.
On Monday, Putin, already Russia’s longest-serving leader since Joseph Stalin, will be inaugurated for a new six-year term. In March, Trump defied his own advisers by congratulating Putin during a post-election phone call, then surprised them again by inviting Putin to Washington for a summit meeting. It seems implausible and politically insane to imagine that Trump would even consider a chummy one-on-one with Putin now, especially when the risks to Trump from the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, into Trump’s Russia ties appear so significant. And yet the invitation, I’m told, was real, and reflects the President’s strongly expressed personal preference.
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Behind the scenes, there was much confusion among Trump’s aides regarding the Putin invitation, which once again called into question whether the President supported his own Administration’s increasingly hawkish policies on Russia. One American national-security expert who spoke with them told me that the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow, the former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, and a senior Kremlin foreign-policy adviser were surprised by Trump’s invitation. They both expected the main focus of the Presidential call to be Trump’s North Korea negotiations and how Russia, traditionally close to the isolated regime, might help. Right after the call, a senior European diplomat later told me, a Russian counterpart briefed on the discussion recounted to him that Trump and Putin had spoken for forty-one minutes, in a friendly and even joking tone, “and, at the end, there was the invitation to come to Washington.”
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... A senior Trump Administration official told me that National Security Council officials had been instructed by Trump to call the Russian Embassy in Washington and make clear that Trump personally wanted the Putin meeting to happen. Several former U.S. officials who follow Russia closely told me they believed that the President remained committed to the offer, despite little enthusiasm on his team. The Trump official told me that Pompeo, no Putin fan, is more or less resigned to the Presidential summit happening. “He is more of the view that, if it’s going to happen, let’s be prepared, let’s get what we can out of it.”
The Russians are certainly hoping so ...
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As for the uncertain politics behind offering to meet Putin amid the Russiagate uproar, a Republican adviser frequently consulted by the President said he thinks it’s all about Trump’s desire to upstage his Presidential predecessors in both parties. “Trump has a similar view that the last three Presidents had, which is ‘All the problems related to Russia are the fault of my stupid predecessor,’ ” the adviser told me, “ ‘and, through the power of my personal charm and charisma, I will be able to get him to fall in line with us.’ ”
Full story: Donald Trump’s Pursuit of an Oval Office Meeting with Vladimir Putin (The New Yorker)