The president responded to condemnations of his performance alongside the Russian president during a news conference in Helsinki, Finland.
President Trump addressed reporters on Tuesday before a meeting with lawmakers in the Cabinet Room of the White House.
The president responded to criticism of his performance during a news conference a day earlier in Helsinki, Finland, when he appeared to side with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia over American intelligence services regarding Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
[ Read our main story on Mr. Trump’s response to criticism of his appearance with Mr. Putin.]
The following is a transcript of Mr. Trump’s statement from the White House, as transcribed by The New York Times.
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PRESIDENT TRUMP: Thank you, everybody.
Yesterday I returned from a trip from Europe where I met with leaders from across the region to seek a more peaceful future for the United States. We’re working very hard with our allies and all over the world we’re working. We’re going to have peace. That’s what we want. That’s what we’re going to have. I say peace through strength.
I have helped the NATO alliance greatly by increasing defense contributions from our NATO allies by over $44 billion, and Secretary Stoltenberg was fantastic. As you know, he reported that they’ve never had an increase like this in their history, and NATO was actually going down as opposed to going up.
And I increased it by my meeting last year, $44 billion and this year will be over — it’ll be hundreds of billions of dollars over the coming years. And I think there’s great unity with NATO.
There’s a lot of very positive things happening. There’s a great spirit that we didn’t have before and there’s a lot of money that they’re putting up. They weren’t paying their bills on time and now they’re doing that, and I want to just say thank you very much to Secretary Stoltenberg. He really has been terrific. So we had a tremendous success.
I also had meetings with Prime Minister May on the range of issues concerning our special relationship, and that’s between the United Kingdom and ourselves. We met with the queen, who is absolutely a terrific person, where she reviewed her honor guard for the first time in 70 years, they tell me. We walked in front of the underguard, and that was very inspiring to see and be with her. And I think the relationship, I can truly say, is a good one.
She was very, very inspiring, indeed.
Most recently I returned from Helsinki, Finland, and I was going to give a news conference over the next couple of days about the tremendous success because as successful as NATO was, I think this was our most successful visit and that had to do, as you know, with Russia.
I met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in an attempt to tackle some of the most pressing issues facing humanity.
We have never been in a worse relationship with Russia than we are as of a few days ago, and I think that’s gotten substantially better and I think it has the possibility of getting much better, and I used to talk about this during the campaign. Getting along with Russia would be a good thing. Getting along with China would be a good thing.
Not a bad thing, a good thing. In fact, a very good thing.
We’re nuclear powers, great nuclear powers. Russia and us have 90 percent of the nuclear weapons. So I’ve always felt getting along is a positive thing, and not just for that reason. I entered the meeting with the firm conviction that diplomacy and engagement is better than hostility and conflict, and I feel that with everybody. We have 29 members in NATO as an example, and I have great relationships or at least very good relationships with everybody.
The press covered it quite inaccurately. They said I insulted people. Well, if asking for people to pay up money that they are supposed to pay is insulting, maybe I did. But I can tell you when I left, everybody was thrilled and that’s the way this was, too. My meeting with President Putin was really interesting in so many different ways because we haven’t had relationships with Russia for a long time. And we started.
Let me begin by saying that, once again, full faith and support for America’s intelligence agencies, I have a full faith in our intelligence agencies.
Oops, they just turned off the light. That must be the intelligence agencies. There it goes, O. K. You guys O. K.? Good. That was strange. But that’s O. K. So I’ll begin by stating that I have full faith and support for America’s great intelligence agencies, always have. And I have felt very strongly that while Russia’s actions had no impact at all on the outcome of the election, let me be totally clear in saying that — and I’ve said this many times — I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election took place. It could be other people also. There’s a lot of people out there. There was no collusion at all, and people have seen that and they’ve seen that strongly.
The House has already come out very strongly on that.
A lot of people have come out strongly on that. I thought that I made myself very clear by having just reviewed the transcript.
Now, I have to say, I came back and I said: “What is going on? What’s the big deal?” So I got a transcript. I reviewed it. I actually went out and reviewed a clip of an answer that I gave, and I realized that there is a need for some clarification.
It should have been obvious, I thought it would be obvious but I would like to clarify just in case it wasn’t. In a key sentence in my remarks, I said the word “would” instead of “wouldn’t.” The sentence should have been “I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t” or “why it wouldn’t be Russia.” So just to repeat it, I said the word “would” instead of “wouldn’t,” and the sentence should have been, and I thought I would be maybe a little bit unclear on the transcript or unclear on the actual video.
The sentence should have been “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,” sort of a double negative. So you can put that in and I think that probably clarifies things pretty good by itself. I have on numerous occasions noted our intelligence findings that Russians attempted to interfere in our elections.
Unlike previous administrations, my administration has and will continue to move aggressively to repeal any efforts and repel, we will stop it, we will repel it, any efforts to interfere in our elections. We’re doing everything in our power to prevent Russian interference in 2018. And we have a lot of power. As you know, President Obama was given information just prior to the election, last election, 2016, and they decided not to do anything about it. The reason they decided that was pretty obvious to all. They thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the election. And they didn’t think it was a big deal.
When I won the election, they thought it was a very big deal. And all of a sudden they went into action, but it was a little bit late. So he was given that in sharp contrast to the way it should be. And President Obama along with Brennan and Clapper and the whole group that you see on television now, probably getting paid a lot of money by your networks, they knew about Russia’s attempt to interfere in the election in September and they totally buried it.
And as I said, they buried it because they thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win. Turned out it didn’t happen that way. By contrast, my administration has taken a very firm stance. It’s a very firm stance on a strong action. We’re going to take strong action to secure our election systems and the process.
Furthermore, as has been stated and we’ve stated it previously and on many occasions: no collusion.
Yesterday, we made significant progress toward addressing some of the worst conflicts on Earth. So when I met with President Putin for about two and a half hours, we talked about numerous things. And among those things are the problems that you see in the Middle East. They’re very much involved. We’re very much involved. I entered the negotiations with President Putin from a position of tremendous strength.
