Second talk reported between Trump, Putin

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump had a second, previously undisclosed, private conversation with President Vladimir Putin of Russia this month, the White House acknowledged Tuesday.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer and National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton confirmed that Trump and Putin spoke at a dinner for world leaders and their spouses at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.

The hourlong conversation occurred with only a Kremlin interpreter present to listen to the exchange. It followed a formal meeting between the two presidents that lasted more than two hours earlier in the day and included their foreign ministers for a fraught discussion about Moscow's attempts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. elections.

In the earlier meeting, Trump questioned the Russian president about his role in the U.S. vote. Putin denied his involvement, and the two men agreed to move beyond the dispute in the interest of finding common ground on other matters, including a limited cease-fire in Syria.

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But the intimate dinner conversation, of which there is no official U.S. government record because no American official other than the president was involved, is the latest to raise eyebrows. Foreign leaders who witnessed it later commented privately on the oddity of an American president flaunting such a close rapport with his Russian counterpart.

The encounter occurred more than midway through the dinner, when Trump left his seat near Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and approached Putin, who had been seated next to Trump's wife, first lady Melania Trump.

Ian Bremmer, who said he spoke with two people who attended the dinner, said attendees described the meeting as startling. Bremmer is a foreign affairs columnist and the president of the Eurasia Group consulting firm.

Trump defended the dinner in a pair of tweets late Tuesday that noted the dinner had been on his public schedule.

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"Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is 'sick.' All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!" he wrote.

A few minutes later he added: "The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!"

Information for this article was contributed by Julie Hirschfeld Davis of The New York Times; and by Vivian Salama and Jill Colvin of The Associated Press.

A Section on 07/19/2017

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