Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson didn't challenge Russian President Vladimir Putin's denial of interfering in the recent U.S. election when they first met in 2017 because "there wasn't any point," David Corn of Mother Jones reports.
Tillerson met with Putin in Moscow on April 12, 2017 for about two hours in what he later told congressional investigators during a private interview with the House Foreign Affairs Committee was "the first opportunity for a representative of the Trump administration at a high level to talk directly to President Putin and express our assessment of our current relationship."
During that private interview, the transcript of which was released this week, Tillerson was asked if he raised the issue of Russian interference with Putin in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
"I brought it up as one of the obstacles. I said there's a lot of obstacles to this relationship, and that was one of them," he said, adding that he told Putin, "obviously this has to stop."
When pressed on whether he challenged Putin during that meeting, Tillerson said, "There wasn't any point in that ... I stated our view. He stated his ... We could spend a lot of time re-litigating the past and we would never deal with this and it will just get worse."
The former secretary said he had not received any instructions from President Donald Trump or anyone else in the White House before meeting with Putin.
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