John Podesta tweets to Trump from road trip pit stop: "Get a grip, man"
Former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta spent part of his cross-country road trip with his wife Friday responding to President Donald Trump's early-morning Twitter claim that "everyone" at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, is talking about him.
Mr. Trump tweeted early Friday, before his first face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, "Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!" The president was referencing hacked emails during the 2016 presidential campaign that WikiLeaks released, although the Democratic National Committee (DNC) email hack and Podesta email hack were separate incidents, and Podesta was not in charge of the DNC.
But Podesta had enough, and responded to "our whack job POTUS" in a series of tweets while on a pit stop Friday morning.
Podesta's emails were hacked during the 2016 presidential campaign and released by WikiLeaks each day from October to Election Day. Podesta recently met with members of the House Intelligence Committee as as a part of their investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Podesta has said he believes Russians were behind the hack.
The Russian hacking issue came up during Friday's meeting between Mr. Trump and Putin. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who attended the meeting, said the two leaders "had a very robust and lengthy exchange on the subject." Putin denied any Russian meddling in the U.S. elections, as he has in the past.
And, according to Tillerson, the two "agreed to exchange further work regarding commitments of non-interference in the affairs of the United States and our democratic process as well as those of other countries."
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who was also present for the meeting, told reporters that Mr. Trump had accepted Putin's assurances that Russia didn't meddle in the U.S. election.
Although Mr. Trump has waffled on whether Russians interfered in the 2016 election, that hasn't stopped him from accusing Podesta, the DNC and former President Barack Obama of negligence in stopping any such attack. On Thursday, Mr. Trump said it "could be Russia" that interfered in the election that resulted in his presidency. He has repeatedly called the ongoing Russia investigations by the FBI and House and Senate intelligence committees a "witch hunt." But he has also blamed the Obama administration for not doing enough about election meddling.
Reporters in Hamburg asked Mr. Trump Friday whether he would raise the topic of election meddling with Putin, but Mr. Trump did not respond, instead turning to Putin to tell the Russian leader something that made him chuckle, according to the White House pool report.
