WASHINGTON _ President Donald Trump says he "strongly pressed" Russian President Vladimir Putin over interference in last year's U.S. election, but he did not contest Russian assertions that in their meeting Friday, he accepted Putin's denials of meddling.
In a series of Twitter posts Sunday morning, Trump did not address the meddling itself, except to say "I've already given my opinion" about it.
Some lawmakers from both parties, meanwhile, said Trump let Putin off the hook too easily and ridiculed his embrace of Russia as a partner in cybersecurity.
Among the sharpest commentary came from a fellow Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
"It's not the dumbest idea I've ever heard, but it's pretty close," Graham said when asked about Trump's plan on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said it would be "dangerously naive" to take Russian offers of cyber-security help at face value.
"We might as well just mail our ballot boxes to Russia," Schiff said on CNN's "State of the Union."
Trump and Putin spoke for more than two hours Friday on the sidelines of the Group of 20 economic summit in Hamburg, Germany, but questions persisted over exactly what was said on the subject of Russia's efforts to sway the 2016 election.
Putin said Saturday that Trump had seemed "satisfied" with his denial �� a stance that directly contradicts U.S. intelligence conclusions that the Russian campaign of interference was carried out with Putin's knowledge. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also said Trump had accepted Putin's protestations of innocence.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was in the meeting room, offered a somewhat different interpretation, saying Trump had repeatedly raised the subject of election meddling and the two sides had agreed to "move on" to other matters.
The day before the meeting, Trump had equivocated about the nature and scope of Russian interference, saying that the Russian government, and perhaps others, may have sought to influence the election.
"No one really knows," Tillerson said at a news conference in Warsaw, Poland.
Reviving a theme of recent days and weeks, Trump again accused former President Barack Obama of failing to act on reports of Russian interference, and blamed the Democratic National Committee, whose emails were hacked by Moscow, for not cooperating more fully with investigators.
After the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion months ago that Putin had direct knowledge of the Russian campaign seeking to sway the election in Trump's favor, there are now multiple investigations into whether people associated with Trump's campaign colluded with Moscow.
