President Trump on Thursday blamed "the real enemy of the people, the fake news media" for portraying his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin as a failure.

He insisted that the meeting, which was met with alarm by Republicans, Democrats, and national security experts, was a "great success," and additionally said that he looked forward to a "second meeting" to move forward on "stopping terrorism, security for Israel, nuclear proliferation," and more.

Intelligence officials have condemned Trump's apparent defense of Putin regarding Russia's interference in U.S. election systems. In a second tweet, Trump baselessly claimed that most media ignored his acknowledgement of Russian meddling out of a desire to "see a major confrontation with Russia." He did, however, praise Fox News for showing clips of him discussing Russia's interference, condemning the rest of the media for wanting "no part of that narrative." Summer Meza

The New York Police Department officer accused of strangling Eric Garner will not face federal charges.

NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo will not be charged in the chokehold death of Garner, whose repeated last words of "I can't breathe" became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement, the Justice Department announced Tuesday. That decision reportedly comes after the DOJ's civil rights division recommended charges, but Attorney General William Barr overruled that suggestion, a senior DOJ official tells ABC News' Alex Mallin.

Garner's July 17, 2014 death was caught on camera after NYPD officers stopped him for allegedly selling cigarettes on a Staten Island street corner. Federal prosecutors then had five years to press charges against Pantaleo, who appeared to use an illegal chokehold on Garner to restrain him and could've been accused of violating Garner's civil rights. But with the statute of limitations on Garner's expiring Wednesday, prosecutors declined to press charges.

That decision, officials tell ABC News and NBC News, comes against the wishes of lawyers in the DOJ's civil rights division. But it's in line with what the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of New York recommended, those officials continued.

Pantaleo did face disciplinary action from the NYPD and has been on desk duty without a gun since Garner's death, The New York Times notes. The NYPD also wrapped a disciplinary trial against Pantaleo in June to determine if he should face further punishment. Kathryn Krawczyk

Former Republican congressman Mark Sanford, who lost his primary in 2018 to a Republican opponent Trump endorsed, says he's considering challenging Trump for the 2020 Republican nomination.

Sanford told The Post and Courier on Tuesday that he plans to weigh a possible 2020 run over the next month, saying that "I feel convicted" and that "the Republican Party has lost its way on debt, spending and financial matters." Should he decide not to challenge Trump, Sanford, who specified he would run as a Republican, said he might instead set up a deficit-focused think tank.

Sanford, who as governor of South Carolina disappeared for six days while secretly having an affair even as his staff claimed he was hiking, often criticized Trump while in Congress, in 2017 telling Politico Trump has "fanned the flames of intolerance." Trump in 2018 went after Sanford on Twitter on the day of his Republican primary as "very unhelpful to me in my campaign to MAGA," endorsing his Republican challenger, Katie Arrington. Sanford was ultimately defeated by Arrington, who lost in the general election. After Sanford's primary loss, Trump reportedly described him in a meeting as a "nasty guy." Brendan Morrow

In the not-so-distant past, former Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-Texas) was the fundraising king. He excelled at reeling in the dough during both his 2018 Texas Senate run and his early presidential campaign. But those days are seemingly over for the 2020 candidate.

O'Rourke has struggled recently when it comes to polls and funding, which is raising questions about whether his once-promising campaign has run out of gas. He is expected to report just $3.6 million between April and June, less than half the $9.4 million he raised in the first quarter. The number also falls short of the $6.1 million he raised in the 24 hours after he first announced his campaign, which is what had people thinking he could be a contender in the first place. Politico called the April through June figure "startlingly small."

The fundraising decline reportedly has O'Rourke's allies on edge, though they think he still has time to get things back on track. If that's to be the case, he probably needs to simultaneously improve his polling numbers, which have also dipped.

It doesn't sound as if O'Rourke is ready to bow out, however. Instead of scaling back, the campaign is making a push by expanding its number of field offices in Iowa.

But in the larger picture, the numbers indicate O'Rourke is fading into the primary's muddied waters. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and former Vice President Joe Biden have begun to separate themselves from the pack in terms of cash and polling data. O'Rourke was never a frontrunner, but he appears to have been displaced by Buttigieg as the election's upstart candidate. Tim O'Donnell

Joe Biden is ready to get civil.

The former vice president is prepared for President Trump to question his age and mental state, just like Trump did during the 2016 presidential race against Hillary Clinton. But instead of challenging Trump to a physical fight like he's mentioned in the past, Biden would rather take Trump on in a push-up contest, he told MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski in a Morning Joe interview aired Tuesday.

Biden and Trump are two objectively old men, yet they've nevertheless publicly fantasized about beating each other up a number of times in the past. So Brzezinski asked Biden what he'd do during a debate if Trump continued to "go after your age, your mental state." "I'd say, 'C'mon Donald, c'mon man. How many push-ups do you want to do here, pal?'" Biden responded. "I mean, jokingly. C'mon, run with me, man." Biden then went on to say he was "not going to get down in the dirt" with Trump, because "that's the only way he knows how to fight."

Perhaps Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), nearly 10 years Biden's senior yet famous for his push-up contests with much younger constituents and reporters, would like to get involved. Fellow 2020 candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who's around the same age as Biden and Trump, meanwhile had no comment. Kathryn Krawczyk

Former Vice President Joe Biden is hitting back against President Trump following his attacks on four minority congresswomen, not only calling the tweets racist but declaring Trump the most "openly racist and divisive" president America has ever seen.

Biden in response to Trump's weekend tweets telling four congresswomen to "go back" to where they came from said on Monday that "there has never been a president in American history who has been so openly racist and divisive as this man," The Hill reports.

The former vice president went on to condemn Trump's tweets as "sickening" and "embarrassing." Biden also tore into the president's comments at an event on Monday, calling what he said a "flat, racist attack" and saying that it's Trump who "should go home," Politico reports.

Biden had previously in his 2020 campaign launch video blasted Trump for his Charlottesville response and in a recent immigration speech said the president while describing immigrants "repeatedly invokes racist invective," per Politico. Trump has insisted that his weekend tweets were "not at all" racist. Brendan Morrow

North Korea said Tuesday that the U.S. will put talks aimed at getting Pyongyang to denuclearize at risk if it goes ahead with summer military exercises with South Korea, Reuters reports. The North Korean Foreign Ministry said the U.S. is continuing a pattern of "unilaterally reneging on its commitments" to North Korea, so Pyongyang has to reconsider its own commitments to discontinue missile and nuclear weapons tests while talks continue.

President Trump last month tried to persuade North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to resume talks on giving up his nuclear weapons by arranging a spur-of-the-moment meeting with Kim on the border between the two Koreas that resulted in an agreement to restart working-level talks that had been on hold since the collapse of their second summit in February. Harold Maass