A US official said a meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is a possibility Wednesday.
Lavrov will be in Washington to meet with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. A meeting with the President has not yet been announced.
Tillerson and Lavrov are scheduled to meet Wednesday to discuss Ukraine, Syria and bilateral issues, the State Department announced Monday.
In addition to the tensions between Washington and Moscow over geopolitics, the meeting between Tillerson and Lavrov, and now a possible meeting between Trump and the Russian foreign minister, come against a backdrop of recriminations over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 elections and the firing of FBI Director James Comey.
Comey was dismissed Tuesday, the White House announced, sweeping away the man who is responsible for the bureau’s investigation into whether members of the Trump campaign team colluded with Russia in its alleged interference in last year’s election.
The Trump administration attributed Comey’s dismissal to his handling of the investigation into Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s email server, but Democrats ridiculed that notion, raising parallels to Watergate-era firings.
Former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates said Monday that she alerted the White House earlier this year that then-Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn could be « essentially blackmailed by the Russians. »
Her testimony pushed the story of the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia back into the headlines.
In an interview last week, Trump once again refused to blame Russia for attempting to influence the 2016 election through hacking and other means, despite an overwhelming consensus by US law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin also spoke by phone last week about the war in Syria for the first time since Trump ordered a missile strike against a Syrian government air base last month after an alleged chemical weapons attack by the regime.
