President Donald Trump said he pressed Russian President Vladimir twice about alleged meddling in the US election last year.

Mr Trump, whose White House is reeling from an admission by his son Donald Trump Jr that he had sought damaging information on Hillary Clinton from a "Russian government attorney", said he spent the first 20 or 25 minutes of their meeting at the G20 last week on the subject.

"I said, did you do it? And he said no, I did not. Absolutely not. I then asked him a second time in a totally different way. He said absolutely not," he told Reuters .

Addressing the political storm surrounding Mr Trump Jr, the president said he had been unaware of his son's meeting with the Russian lawyer.

"No, that I didn't know until a couple of days ago when I heard about this," he said in the interview. "I think many people would have taken that meeting."

In a separate interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, his first non-Fox News interview in over two months, Mr Trump defended his relationship with Mr Putin and insisted he was acting in America’s best interests.

"People said, 'Oh, they shouldn't get along,'” he said