WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump stood in Helsinki on Monday beside his patron, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and refused to confront him on Moscow’s systematic interference in the 2016 US presidential election on his behalf, its military intervention into a sovereign neighbor or on its continued effort to undermine democratic systems worldwide through propaganda and cyberwarfare.Instead, Trump spoke defensively of his electoral victory and insisted that he won fair and square without Russian help. He stood next to Putin and attacked domestic political rivals, the Justice Department, and the FBI for investigating what happened while ignoring questions over his own intelligence community’s assessment that Putin did, in fact, order a sophisticated influence campaign in states that ultimately decided the election outcome.“This was not the plan,” a US official directly involved in planning the Helsinki summit between the leaders told CNN.Trump spoke of the 2016 electoral college map and of online conspiracy theories designed to undermine an ongoing investigation into Russia’s role in the race, questioning why law enforcement failed to seize Democratic National Committee servers that were hacked by Russian military intelligence officers and whether it was that organization – not his campaign – that had conspired with Moscow to lose the election. He called the appointment of a special counsel on Russian interference and the involvement of US persons in that effort, Robert Mueller III, a “disgrace” to the country and an impediment to his own efforts to improve ties with Russia.But pressed directly by US reporters – who Trump has referred to as “enemies of the American people” – whether he would condemn Russia over the empirical evidence of their election meddling, Trump again declined – on the contrary, praising Putin for offering to participate in Mueller’s investigation and nodding approvingly as Putin denied his personal involvement.Putin did not answer a question on whether he has collected compromising personal material on Trump and his family. And while he denied ordering the election interference, he did, for the first time, acknowledge he had a preference in the 2016 race.“Yes, I did,” Putin said. “I wanted him to win.”Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says the talks between Putin and Trump were “magnificent,” Russian media reported.The extraordinary news conference in Finland came four days after the Justice Department released an exceptionally detailed indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence officers, showing how they interfered in the campaign with precision by hacking the DNC and strategically releasing the Democrats’ e-mails.“I think that the probe is a disaster for our country,” Trump said, standing next to Putin at Finland’s presidential palace. “I think it’s kept us apart. It’s kept us separated. There was no collusion at all. Everybody knows it. People are being brought out to the fore. So far that I know, virtually none of it related to the campaign.”Trump made no mention of Putin’s invasion, annexation and occupation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea; of Moscow’s efforts to meddle in recent elections in Britain, France and Germany; nor of warnings from his own director of national intelligence that Russia is preparing to interfere in the 2018 US midterm elections.US national security and intelligence officials were aghast and speechless at the performance.“The president of the United States essentially capitulated, and seems intimidated by Vladimir Putin,” said James Clapper, a career intelligence official who served as director of national intelligence through the 2016 race. “It’s extremely disturbing.”Chuck Hagel, a former senator and defense secretary, said that Trump “failed America” in the press conference. And John Brennan, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center under former president George W. Bush and CIA director under former president Barack Obama, said it amounted to an impeachable act.“Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to and exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’” Brennan wrote on Twitter, referring to the threshold for impeachment. “It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican patriots: Where are you?”<doc-sep>It was like nothing anybody had ever seen. Nobody acquainted with Donald Trump expected the July 16 Helsinki summit—which wasn’t really a summit, more like a one-on-one-date between the presidents of Russia and the United States, to use the reality TV lingo which created the current Trump persona—to yield anything of substance, diplomatically speaking. Our president, after all, doesn’t do substance. Yet substance of a sort arrived, inadvertently, in the presser which followed the presidential meeting, which went on for nearly two hours. What was said behind closed doors? Only the two presidents and their translators know (as do Russian intelligence and whatever other spy services bugged the room) but it’s a safe bet, knowing Trump and his manic indiscipline, that the press event reflected the summit’s secret content. By which I mean the American president submissively kowtowing to his Russian counterpart in a fashion which no American president has ever done before. That presser will go down in the record books and will be discussed and dissected by historians and pundits as long as Donald Trump is remembered. It was frankly an outrage for anyone who cares about America and the West and our shared values, which are under attack by Vladimir Putin, who has unleashed his powerful spy agencies, spreading spies, hackers, and lies to undermine our democracies—and none more than America’s in 2016. None of that was in evidence in Helsinki, however, and before the cameras the American president opted not to fudge inevitably awkward questions—after all, it’s a tricky visual when Trump’s standing right next to the guy whose spies stand accused by Trump’s own Justice Department of hacking and smearing Trump’s 2016 election opponents—rather to take the Russian point of view, whole-hog. While any savvy observer expected Trump to deliver his usual “Why can’t we just be friends with Russia?” platitudes, the president’s performance went well beyond banal pro-Kremlin utterances. Trump whined at length about the Robert Mueller-led Special Counsel investigation (which he repeatedly termed “ridiculous”) into his ties to the man a few feet away from him at the opposite podium: “As president, I cannot make decisions on foreign policy in a futile effort to appease partisan critics or the media or Democrats who want to do nothing but resist and obstruct … I think that the probe is a disaster for our country. I think it’s kept us apart. It’s kept us separated. There was no collusion at all. Everybody knows it.” Per his custom, Trump made clear that, morally speaking, America is in no position to judge Russia: “I think the United States has been foolish. I think we have all been foolish. We should have had this dialogue a long time ago, a long time frankly before I got to office. I think we’re all to blame.” That Trump uttered this just a day before the fourth anniversary of the Russian military’s shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over Russian-occupied Eastern Ukraine, killing 298 innocents, made this especially repulsive. When asked point blank if he accepts the verdict of his own Intelligence Community that Putin’s meddled in our 2016 election, Trump sided with the Russians in a manner which made clear where he thinks the blame lies—and it’s not in Moscow: “It came out as a reason why the Democrats lost an election, which frankly, they should have been able to win … here was no collusion. I didn’t know the president. There was nobody to collude with. There was no collusion with the campaign.” Trump then diverted into a conspiratorial word-salad which embraced the full range of kook-right theories about the “real” 2016 election scandal, which involved Hillary Clinton, missing email servers, and related fantasies which are normally relegated to the tinfoil set, but which were elaborated on live TV by the American president. Trump made his position perfectly clear on the Intelligence Community’s assessment: “My people came to me, [Director of National Intelligence] Dan Coats came to me and some others and said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server.” When offered the opportunity to state, for the record, how he feels about the IC’s unanimous finding that Kremlin spies meddled in his election, Trump did not obfuscate, he did not meander: he made abundantly clear that he considers the word of the Kremlin boss, the man who meddled in our 2016 election, to be as valid as the assessment of our vast, highly informed, 16-agency Intelligence Community. Adding insult to injury, Trump brushed off the sensational news story which broke on Friday, that the Mueller inquiry indicted 12 named Russian officials for their role in the hacking and smearing of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in 2016, to Trump’s advantage. Although it had long been obvious that Kremlin spies were behind this crime, it’s a big deal when the Justice Department publicly points the finger at Russian military intelligence, or GRU, as the culprit. Predictably, Trump in Helsinki pretended to have barely heard of this bombshell: “Every time you hear all of these 12 and 14—it’s stuff that has nothing to do—and frankly, they admit, these are not people involved in the campaign.” Robert Mueller will be the judge of that, and it’s no secret in Washington that his investigators are looking closely at which members of Team Trump, above all the president’s longtime pal and self-proclaimed “ratf*cker” Roger Stone, parlayed with GRU officials in 2016 to conspire against Democrats. President Trump’s laughable denials and obfuscations have failed to throw the Muller inquiry off the tracks to date, and they’re unlikely to start working now. Especially now, after Helsinki, when Trump’s mask finally dropped completely, before the cameras and the world. The key question, long asked by this columnist, regarding why exactly Donald Trump is so submissive to the Kremlin, is now appearing in the mainstream media. As it should, indeed it should have long ago.<doc-sep>Trump and Putin did not shake hands when they entered, sullenly. The United Nations may have judged Finland the happiest country in the world, but the Helsinki summit failed to make Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin smile. The American and Russian leaders seemed almost theatrically sour as they sat down for their first formal one-on-one summit despite the city's un-Baltic heatwave. Perhaps fearing that Trump's eagerness to forge a bond with Putin be mistaken for cheerful naivety, US officials played along with the serious mood. Trump and Putin did not shake hands when they entered, sullenly, but only when they began a lengthy closed-door meeting that had the diplomatic world on edge. And when White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders tweeted out a picture, she chose a sombre black and white showing Putin's eyes lowered and Trump looking dully angry. The body langauge was awkward, but television footage later showed Trump offering a stone-faced Putin a reassuring wink. There was none of the breezy pageantry of Trump's summit with North Korea's Kim Jong Un, or the tactile camaraderie of French President Emmanuel Macron's White House visit. Perhaps this was to be expected. There is a lot at stake for the presidents, both in terms of global security and their personal and political reputations. But if the occasion stifled their smiles, it was not for lack of a welcome from Helsinki, hosting its biggest East-West summit since the Cold War. Even the Scandinavian summer was on its best behaviour, with sunshine and 30 degree Celsius heat (86F) at the harbour-front venue during almost 20 hours of daylight. Securing the summit represented the biggest operation for Finland's small police force since Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin came to Helsinki in 1997. The country has the lowest number of officers per capita of any in the European Union, but the police were able to handle both press and small crowds of peaceful protesters. A military patrol vessel chugged around the busy harbour from time to time, between cruise liners and tour boats, but there was no theatrical ring of steel. The warm welcome also extended to facilities for the press -- more than 2,000 of whom were accredited to cover the one-day summit. Both leaders were told "Welcome to the land of free press" by billboards on the route from the airport, paid for by the top-selling newspaper Helsingin Sanomat. While the White House press corps took over a conference centre overlooking the sun-dappled harbour, international reporters took over the Finlandia Hall. A venue for classical music designed by celebrated architect Alvar Aalto, the Finlandia was equipped with a lounge to watch Sunday's World Cup final. Cold War summit hub Craft beers and local delicacies competed with an on-site sauna to tempt reporters away from their laptops and cameras. In all, it was an impressive operation -- especially as Finland had been given only 10 days to revive its role as a host of crucial security summits. Finland was chosen for its non-aligned status, even if it maintains a distrust of Russia and leans West -- President Sauli Niniisto attended last week's NATO summit. Before the Yeltsin-Clinton summit, George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev came to Helsinki in 1990, just a year before the Soviet Union fell apart. And in 1975, Gerald Ford and Leonid Brezhnev signed the Helsinki Accords, to uphold the post-war carve-up of Europe agreed by Washington, Moscow and London. So the city has a track record as a bridge between its friends in the West and nearby Russian neighbours -- even if it also has a long memory. In pride of place among the delicacies on offer to reporters in all the summit venues: Karelian pastries, served with egg butter. Karelia is to Finns a historical province of Finland, now part of Russia, which controlled all of the country between 1809 and 1917. Things have moved on for Finland since their bitter battle for independence. So much so that the 2018 UN World Happiness Report named it the cheeriest spot on Earth.<doc-sep>NEW A vastly improved search engine helps you find the latest on companies, business leaders, and news more easily.<doc-sep>
For the past year and a half, even when President Donald Trump said he was being treated unfairly by mainstream news sources, he could rely on the support of conservative media outlets – until Helsinki. Even Trump's most ardent supporters in the media including the opinion hosts at Fox News Channel and The Wall Street Journal were critical of his siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the issue of interference in the 2016 presidential election. It remains to be seen whether Trump's attempts Tuesday to walk back his comments made in Helsinki can repair the damage. The president Tuesday said he accepted the U.S. intelligence community's assessment that Russians interfered with the 2016 election – with a qualifier. Professing "full faith and support for America's great intelligence agencies," Trump told reporters at the White House, "it could be other people also" involved in the hacking of Democrats and pushing fake news during the 2016 presidential campaign. More:Trump voices support for U.S. intelligence a day after fueling bipartisan outrage with Putin comments Just a day ago while standing next to Putin during a joint press conference in Helsinki, Trump questioned the U.S. intelligence community's finding and said that the U.S. carries as much blame as Russia for tattered relations between the two superpowers. "I think that the United States has been foolish," Trump said. "I think we've all been foolish." The result predictably led to criticism from news hosts and expert guests on CNN and MSNBC, but that flowed over to Fox News, too. “There is an avalanche of you-know-what rolling downhill at warp speed toward @realDonaldTrump over this summit," Fox’s chief White House correspondent John Roberts tweeted. "Republicans — even the DNI (Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats ) are throwing bucketsful at him." In an editorial, The Wall Street Journal declared the Helsinki summit's press conference "a personal and national embarrassment." Other outlets usually considered Trump apologists, including The Washington Times and The Drudge Report, came down critically on the president, too. The shift in sentiment could signal a new trouble spot for Trump as he attempts to move beyond the Helsinki summit. "We're starting to see right-wing journalists criticize Trump in ways they haven't before because even they can't swallow defending the indefensible," said Mark Feldstein, a broadcast journalism professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Conservative journalists find themselves in the "same bind the Republican Party is in," he says. "They either have to tie themselves to Trump, with all the unpredictability, demagoguery and extremism that brings, or risk alienating his very loyal base." And it could lead to increased tensions with the media. Just as The Washington Post, The New York Times and other outlets last year began calling out presidential lies, "I think there’s a similar line that has been crossed here," says Kyle Pope, editor-in-chief of the Columbia Journalism Review. Now, "there is a journalistic conversation around 'Something is wrong here and we need to get serious about addressing it.' That was the general media conversation, but then you saw even some of the conservative media picking up the same thing," Pope said. The criticism continued Tuesday on Fox and Friends, a morning show that Trump watches and has appeared on. Co-host Steve Doocy, who just last month interviewed Trump live on the West Lawn, said the president's submission to Trump "has got a lot of people ... criticizing him for not being bold.” Fox and Friends Weekend co-host Abby Huntsman, also on the show, joined in, saying, "it was that one moment that you had to stand up for your own country, and stand up for your intelligence community. And as we’ve said this morning – he did not do that.” Similarly, on Fox Business Network, Maria Bartiromo sided with the Journal's editorial and called Helsinki "probably the low point of the presidency so far.” Still, some on the opinion side for Fox News and Fox Business remained stalwart with Trump. Sean Hannity, who interviewed Trump Monday night, told him, "you were very strong at the end of that press conference." Also Monday night, Lou Dobbs on Fox Business called the president's critics "morons" and said the media's carping is "stupid stuff. This is beyond the pale, as far as I’m concerned."