Top Trump aide says US invited Putin to Washington

US President Donald Trump’s top security aide said Friday the United States has invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to Washington.

National Security Adviser John Bolton also confirmed Trump will meet Putin next month when the two are in Paris for the Armistice Day Centennial Commemoration marking the end of World War I, according to Reuters.

The news agency said it was unclear if Putin accepted the invitation.

Bolton, who was speaking at a news conference in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi, said the meeting in Paris between the leaders would be brief.

Trump and Putin last met in July in the Finnish capital of Helsinki for their first bilateral summit, after which he received bipartisan flak for not challenging the Russian leader on election meddling.

Trump has often been reluctant to give full-throated backing to the US intelligence findings that Russia sought to intervene in the 2016 presidential election and has expressed his desire to cultivate a relationship with Putin to improve ties with Moscow.

Special counsel Robert Mueller is currently investigating whether Trump and his campaign team collaborated with Russia during the election, an allegation denied by both the US president and Russia.

The revelation from Bolton came just days after the Kremlin said it was ready to discuss the possibility of a summit in Washington next year between Putin and Trump.

While in Moscow, Bolton also said he told Russian officials the Kremlin hurt itself by meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.

Wrapping up two days of talks in Moscow, Bolton said Tuesday he told his Russian interlocutors that Moscow’s meddling has been “particularly harmful for Russian-American relations without providing anything for them in return.”

Bolton dismissed any suggestion that Russian actions may have affected the election results but said “it’s the effort alone to interfere in our elections that are objectionable.

“The fact was that the outcome would have been the same by all the evidence we have,” said Bolton after his talks with Putin and his top lieutenants.

“What the meddling did was create distrust and animosity within the United States, and particularly made it almost impossible for two years for the United States and Russia to make any progress. That’s a huge loss for both countries, particularly for Russia,” he said. “So it’s a lesson I think: Don’t mess with American elections.”

Russia has staunchly denied any state-sponsored meddling, although Putin has suggested some “patriotic” individual hackers might have been involved.

The US has accused a group of agents with Russia’s GRU military intelligence of a damaging hack of Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 campaign. Special investigator Robert Mueller indicted 12 people identified as GRU officers in July as part of his probe into possible Russian collusion with Donald Trump’s campaign.

In addition, Mueller has indicted 13 Russians suspected of working for a so-called troll factory that allegedly spread disinformation and manipulated American voters online.