United States President Donald Trump has refuted a Washington Post report which claimed that he had refused to share details of his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin with top US government officials. In a telephone interview with Fox News, Trump dismissed as ridiculous the Post story that alleged that he went to great lengths to hide the content of his talks with Putin, even confiscating the notes of his interpreter and ordering that person to not discuss what was said.
The US President said he had a great conversation with Putin in Helsinki in July 2018. To a question on why he has not released details of the nearly two-hour conversation, Trump said, "I would, I don’t with care." He added: "I mean, I had a conversation like every President does. You sit with the President of various countries... We were talking about Israel and securing Israel and lots of other things... I'm not keeping anything under wraps, I couldn’t care less. I mean, it’s so ridiculous."
Trump further said" "Anybody could have listened to that meeting, that meeting is up for grabs." As per the Post report, there is no detailed record of Trump’s personal talks with Mr. Putin at five locations over the past two years. The newspaper report quoted unnamed current and former government officials as sources for the story. Trump also slammed an earlier story in The New York Times stating that the FBI launched a previously undisclosed counterintelligence investigation to determine whether he posed a national security threat, at the same time that it opened a criminal probe into possible obstruction of justice. He termed the Times story as "the most insulting article I’ve ever had written and if you read the article, you’d see that they found absolutely nothing."
