As US President Donald Trump read a statement expressing his “full faith and support” to the US intelligence agencies, which he was accused of demeaning at the Helsinki summit, the White House went dark for a moment.
“I have full faith and support… for America’s intelligence agencies,” Trump said on Tuesday afternoon, reading off a document prepared for him. At that point, the lights went out in the room.
“Oops, they just turned off the light. That must be the intelligence agencies,” Trump joked, to chuckles from the Republican lawmakers he was meeting with.
Almost all the major US media outlets, the Democratic Party, and even many of Trump’s own Republicans, condemned him on Monday for going against the US intelligence community which says that Russia actively interfered in the 2016 US presidential election.
Trump gave a somewhat confusing explanation of his remarks in Helsinki, telling reporters that when he said he saw no reason why Russia “would” interfere in the US election, he meant to say he saw no reason why it “would not” be Russia.