Russian President Vladimir Putin has officially been invited to Washington.
White House National Security Adviser John Bolton confirmed Friday that Putin had received a formal invitation to meet with Trump in D.C., Reuters reports. If Putin accepts, the meeting would take place in 2019, and it would be Putin's first time sitting down with a president in the U.S. in four years.
It would also be Putin's first meeting with a president in Washington since he met with George W. Bush at the White House in 2005, Fox News reports. “We have invited President Putin to Washington after the first of the year for, basically, a full day of consultations,” Bolton said. “What the scheduling of that is we don't quite know yet.”
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The White House had previously discussed the idea of Putin visiting in the fall, but some critics called on the Trump administration to rescind that invite after the Helsinki summit. That meeting with Putin earned Trump widespread condemnation when he appeared to side with the Russian president over his own intelligence agencies by saying Russia had no reason to interfere in the 2016 election. Trump and Putin are scheduled to meet in Paris on Nov. 11.
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