President Donald Trump will wait until 2019 to host Russian President Vladimir Putin, national security adviser John Bolton said. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo White House delays Trump-Putin meeting, blames Mueller probe The announcement appears to be part of an optics push that Trump is getting tough on Russia.

President Donald Trump will not host Russian President Vladimir Putin in Washington until 2019, White House national security adviser John Bolton said Wednesday, because it is Trump’s preference not to do so until “the Russia witch hunt is over.”

“The President believes that the next bilateral meeting with President Putin should take place after the Russia witch hunt is over, so we've agreed that it will be after the first of the year,” Bolton said in a statement distributed through the White House press pool.


Despite the White House’s announced timeline for a second Putin meeting, there is no hard deadline for special counsel Robert Mueller to wrap up his Russia investigation, which Trump has often referred to as a "witch hunt." And there is no public indication that Mueller will do so by the end of the year.

The announcement appears part of a larger push from the Trump administration to publicly stiffen its spine against Russia. There are also plans for a National Security Council meeting on election security, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement on Wednesday that the U.S. will never recognize Russia’s military annexation of Crimea away from Ukraine.

The White House initially announced last week that Trump had invited Putin to Washington this coming fall, with the president himself tweeting that he was looking forward to a second sit-down with his Russian counterpart after their bilateral meeting last week in Finland was a “great success.”

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But Putin appeared hesitant to accept Trump’s invitation, with Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov saying on Tuesday that “there are other options [to meet] which our leaders can look at,” including the G-20 summit in Argentina this November.

“After the [Helsinki] summit you know what kind of atmosphere there is around its outcome,” Ushakov said, according to Reuters. “I think it would be wise to let the dust settle and then we can discuss all these questions in a business-like way. But not now.”

Bolton’s scheduling announcement comes on the heels of Trump’s much-criticized meeting last week with Putin, one in which the U.S. president appeared willing to accept his counterpart’s denial that Russia was behind a 2016 campaign of cyberattacks intended to interfere in the presidential election. Trump also expressed interest in allowing Americans, including a former ambassador to Moscow, to be interrogated by Russian investigators.

The White House spent much of last week walking-back — with varying degrees of success — the president’s remarks from his bilateral press conference with Putin, which prompted scathing bipartisan criticism and added fresh fuel to unverified theories that the Kremlin may possess compromising information on Trump.