Responding to press questions before a meeting of his cabinet, Donald Trump appeared to again flatly deny that the Russian government is currently involved in efforts to target U.S. elections.
This is a direct contradiction of what his own intelligence officials have been saying publicly: the stated warnings of the intelligence community are that Russian attempts to influence and interfere with the midterm elections next November are robust and ongoing. His remarks come a day after he was forced to walk back some of his behavior at the Trump-Putin summit, in which he dismissed the findings of the U.S. intelligence community that the Russian government was behind espionage efforts crafted to assist him in gaining the White House during the 2016 presidential elections.
Trump also declared that there has been “no president ever as tough as I have been on Russia.”