Top Trump aide denies reports of Iceland summit with Putin
A top aide to Donald Trump is denying a report that the president-elect will meet with Russian leader Vladimir Putin on his first foreign trip once in office.
Sean Spicer, Mr. Trump’s incoming White House press secretary, called the report -- first published by The Sunday Times of London -- “100% false” in tweets late Saturday that referenced other U.S. outlets republishing the news.
not true - report is 100% false #facts https://t.co/nDSqknFD3R
— Sean Spicer (@seanspicer) January 15, 2017
Nope, not true https://t.co/bkEqDiD7qV
— Sean Spicer (@seanspicer) January 15, 2017
The Sunday Times cited unnamed sources in its report that the Trump transition team had told British officials of their plans to gather with Putin. The newspaper also reported that the meeting could take place at a summit in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik, mirroring former President Ronald Reagan’s gathering with the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986.
Moscow has also denied that there had been official chatter about a Trump-Putin meeting in Iceland.
“There have not been talks about a meeting yet,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told Russian news agency RIA.
The denial of the Sunday Times report came shortly after Mr. Trump’s team confirmed that Michael Flynn, the incoming administration’s national security adviser, had direct communication with Russia’s U.S. ambassador multiple times.
It also comes amid recent comments by Mr. Trump to the Wall Street Journal acknowledging his openness to lifting sanctions on Russia.
In an hour-long interview, the paper asked the president-elect whether he would nix the sanctions put in place by the Obama administration last month as a response to the intelligence community’s report of Kremlin-directed hacks on the U.S. election. His response: “If you get along and if Russia is really helping us, why would anybody have sanctions if somebody’s doing some really great things?”
Mr. Trump added, however, that he intended to keep the sanctions for “at least a period of time.”
The president-elect also admitted that Putin had indeed expressed interest in meeting with him after his inauguration.
Of potential face time with the Russian leader, Mr. Trump told the Journal that it would be “absolutely fine” with him.