President Donald Trump wants to be in a “position of strength” at his meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin — and won’t demand the extradition of 12 spies indicted for a hack attack on Democratic email servers, White House national security adviser John Bolton said Sunday.
In an interview o ABC News’ “This Week,” Bolton said “it’s pretty silly for the president to demand something that he can’t get legally.”
“For the president to demand something that isn’t going to happen puts the president in a weak position, and I think the president has made it very clear he intends to approach this discussion from a position of strength,” Bolton said.
"This indictment, a product of the Department of Justice… say that prosecutors have to believe that it’s … substantially more likely … to take a guilty beyond reasonable doubt as to every element of the offenses being charged. And that I think is what strengthens the president.
“And going into Vladimir Putin, that’s the strength of the evidence that the department has accumulated. That’s what he has to answer."
Bolton added: “That's what one of the purposes of this meeting is, so the president can see eye to eye with President Putin and ask him about it.”
Bolton added that the Russians are “well aware” of the indictments from the special counsel Robert Mueller.
“How this conversation is going to go I think will be determined by the two parties,” he said. “We have asked that the Russians have agreed that it will be basically unstructured. We’re not looking for concrete deliverables here.”
But Bolton said Putin will be in an awkward spot, saying that in his own meeting with the Russian president last month, Putin “made it plain that he said the Russian state was not involved [in election meddling] and he was very clear with his translator that that's the word that he wanted.”
“Now we'll have to see given that these are allegations concerning [Russia’s intelligence agency] agents, obviously part of the Russian state, what he says about it now.”
Bolton also defended Trump’s frustration with Mueller’s probe, and his repeated charge that it’s a “witch hunt.”
“I think what he’s suggesting is that his political opponent in the United States for well all over a year and a half have been trying to say that somehow he’s a dupe for the Russian intelligence services, that he’s an agent of the Kremlin, that he’s been compromised by Russia, that he blinked to Russia, that he takes orders from Vladimir Putin,” Bolton said.
“The conspiracies are about as obscure as you can imagine, just subject to people’s imagination. That’s what he’s talking about,” he added.
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