Orangutan and Puty to have a date in July.. Orangutan already greasing up his asshole...

Trump to meet with Putin in Helsinki on July 16

By LOUIS NELSON

President Donald Trump will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin next month in Finland, the White House announced Thursday, setting up a historic summit between two presidents who often speak warmly of one another even as their nations have become increasingly at odds.

"President Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation will meet on July 16, 2018, in Helsinki, Finland," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement Thursday morning. "The two leaders will discuss relations between the United States and Russia and a range of national security issues."

The meeting comes as Trump’s 2016 campaign remains the subject of an ongoing investigation led by special counselor Robert Mueller aimed at probing allegations that the president’s campaign colluded with the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with that year’s election. Trump has labeled that investigation a “witch hunt” and has at times cast doubt on the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia was indeed behind the election interference efforts.

Trump has expressed even more skepticism towards the intelligence community's assessment that Russia acted specifically with the intent of aiding his presidential campaign and harming that of Hillary Clinton. The White House has been insistent that the Kremlin’s efforts had no impact on the election’s outcome.

Russia has repeatedly denied any efforts to interfere in the 2016 election, a defense the president has often highlighted, including as recently as Thursday morning, when he wrote on Twitter that “Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!”

Despite Trump's seemingly begrudging acceptance that the Kremlin was behind the election-meddling campaign — his administration has imposed sanctions on Russia as punishment — the U.S. president has expressed a strong interest in improving relations with Russia and suggested last month that it be allowed back into the G-7 nations, which was formerly the G-8 until Russia was thrown out over its annexation of Crimea away from Ukraine.

And even amid increased tensions between their two nations, Trump and Putin have been publicly friendly with one another, including last March when the U.S. president went against the advice of his advisers and congratulated Putin on his reelection even though the election was branded a "sham" by a Washington-based nonpartisan watchdog.

On that same March telephone call with Putin, Trump did not raise the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, an attack for which both the U.S. and the United Kingdom have formally blamed Russia.

Trump’s summit with Putin will be tacked onto an already scheduled trip to Europe that also includes a NATO summit on July 11-12 and a July 13 a visit to the United Kingdom. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Thursday that the president would not return to the U.S. between his July 13 visit to the United Kingdom and his July 16 summit with Putin and that a more detailed travel schedule will be released soon.

The Trump-Putin summit will come almost exactly one year after their first meeting as presidents last July at the G-20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany. There, the two presidents engaged in a "robust" discussion of Russia's election meddling, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said after the meeting that Trump had accepted Putin's assurances that the Kremlin had not orchestrated a campaign to interfere in U.S. elections.

After another meeting with Putin last November, this one on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Trump told reported that "I believe he [Putin] feels he and Russia did not meddle. As to whether I believe it or not, I'm with our agencies, especially as currently constituted."

The ally-then-strongman scheduling is similar to a Trump itinerary from earlier this month, when the president attended a contentious G-7 meeting in Canada, where he clashed badly with other world leaders, then left early to travel to Singapore for his historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Helsinki, the venue for Trump’s meeting with Putin, has a long history of hosting summits between U.S. and Russian leaders. The city played host to President George H.W. Bush’s 1990 meeting with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and was where President Gerald Ford signed the Helsinki Accords, aimed at improving relations with the Soviet Union.

The Finnish capital also holds a more practical benefit for Putin, potentially affording him the chance to attend the final game of the World Cup, which his nation is hosting, scheduled for July 15.

The summit’s formal announcement follows meetings Wednesday between Putin and U.S. national security adviser John Bolton, who said at a press conference in Moscow that he expects Russia’s election interference efforts, as well as arms control and other national security issues, to be among the topics the two presidents discuss. Both Bolton and the Russian delegation stressed the importance of open lines of communications between the two nations.

At his press conference, Bolton also seemingly sought to get ahead of potential criticism of the president’s willingness to meet with Putin, telling reporters at Russia’s Interfax news agency that “a lot of people have said or implied over time that a meeting between President Trump and President Putin would somehow prove some nexus between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, which is complete nonsense.”

“A lot of the president’s critics have tried to make political capital out of theories and suppositions that have turned out to be completely erroneous,” Bolton said. “But I think the president determined, despite the political noise in the United States, that direct communication between him and President Putin was in the interest of the United States, in the interest of Russia, in the interest of peace and security around the world.”