“I have never discussed it with Putin. I would, I have no problem with that,” Trump said in a clip from the interview, which will air on HBO on Monday. HBO is owned by WarnerMedia, the same parent company as CNN.
The president said he spoke to Putin by phone last Thursday.
“No, that was a phone call to discuss other things, and frankly, that’s an issue that a lot of people said was fake news,” Trump said in the Axios interview.
Russian intelligence officers for the GRU, a military intelligence unit, offered money to Taliban militants in Afghanistan as a reward for murdering American or British troops there, a European intelligence official told CNN last month.
During the Axios interview, Trump was pressured on who specifically said the reports were “fake news.”
“Lots of people,” Trump replied, pointing to “the people of the Bush administration.”
Trump said later Wednesday that he would be “very angry” if the intelligence “was true.”
“I don’t know why they would do it, but if you tell me they are doing it, I would certainly take it into consideration,” Trump told reporters at the South Lawn of the White House before leaving for a trip. to texas
Trump also said he would “respond appropriately” to the reward issue if intelligence works.
Generous intelligence, he told Axios, “never made it to my desk.”
“If it had gotten to my desk, I would have done something about it. It never got to my desk,” he said, continuing to say that he does read his summary book and that he “understands (remarkably) very well.”
He said the two discussed nuclear proliferation and “numerous things.”
When asked if Russia supplied weapons to the Taliban, Trump also said, “Well, we also supply weapons when they were fighting Russia,” adding that he did not ask John Nicholson, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, about the matter.
“The most critical and sacred obligation of a commander-in-chief is to protect those who serve our endangered nation. But months later, the US intelligence community raised the alarm, to Donald Trump and our allies, from that Russia was Placing rewards on the heads of the American military and women in a war zone, our president continues to turn his back on those who risked their lives for our country and their own duty, “said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden’s campaign. in a statement on Wednesday.
And Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington, accused Trump on CNN’s “New Day” of continuing to “embrace Vladimir Putin,” adding that it is “inconceivable to me” that intelligence has not reached the President’s desk.
The White House, however, has said there was a lack of consensus in the intelligence community on reward intelligence. General Frank McKenzie, the chief supervisory general for US operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan, said earlier this month that information about Russian operations offering rewards to Taliban-linked militants was “very troubling”, but that the information was not solid enough to wait in a court of law. He also said at the time that he was not convinced that the rewards program was directly responsible for the death of US personnel.
CNN’s Marshall Cohen, Arlette Saenz, and Veronica Stracqualursi contributed to this report.
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