WATCH: President Trump tells @CBSEveningNews‘ @jeffglor that he is going into the Helsinki summit with “low expectations” and that he will consider asking Russia to extradite agents indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. More on @FaceTheNation Sunday. https://t.co/59FYX8FTIg pic.twitter.com/u0rwS8rkxk
— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 15, 2018
President Donald Trump says he hadn’t thought about asking President Vladimir Putin to send over the Russians indicted for allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election.
“Well I might,” Trump said after a question by CBS News’ Jeff Glor. “I hadn’t thought of that. But I certainly, I’ll be asking about it. But again, this was during the Obama administration. They were doing whatever it was during the Obama administration. And I heard that they were trying, or people were trying, to hack into the RNC, too, the Republican National Committee, but we had much better defenses.”
He said the DNC should be ashamed of getting hacked.
Then-Director of the FBI James Comey told the Senate last year that old RNC domains were hacked by Russians, but these were not being used anymore. Investigators did not find evidence that “the Trump campaign or current RNC was successfully hacked,” he said. None of that information was leaked, he said.
Trump is set to meet Putin for a one-on-one summit on Monday at Helsinki, Finland. This comes just three days after a grand jury indicted 12 Russians for hacking and releasing information from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Each defendant was allegedly a Russian intelligence agent.
U.S. intelligence officers said in a report declassified in January 2017 that the Kremlin led efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election in order to help Trump and hurt Clinton. The U.S. government has imposed over 200 sanctions on Russian-related targets for this behavior and its actions in the Ukraine, according to an internal government document obtained by The New York Times. Despite this, when asked about Russian interference, Trump will often point toward denials by Kremlin officials, and say he wants a good relationship with Russia.
[Screengrab via CBS]
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