US President Donald Trump, under fire over his Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin, doubled down Thursday by saying he looks forward to meeting the Russian leader again — with talks already underway for a visit to Washington in the fall.

Trump has come in for bipartisan criticism for what many saw as his unsettling embrace of the Russian strongman this week — and his seeming disavowal of his own intelligence agencies and their assessment that Moscow meddled in the 2016 election.

The backlash has thrust Trump onto the defensive, leading to days of conflicting statements from both the president and the White House.

But Trump has largely shrugged off the criticism and took aim at the “fake news media” Thursday for failing to recognize his achievements.

“The Summit with Russia was a great success, except with the real enemy of the people, the Fake News Media,” Trump said on Twitter. “The Fake News Media wants so badly to see a major confrontation with Russia, even a confrontation that could lead to war.”

In an interview with CNBC television, Trump said “getting along with President Putin, getting along with Russia’s a positive, not a negative.

“Now with that being said if it doesn’t work out I’ll be the worst enemy he’s ever had,” he said of Putin.

“I look forward to our second meeting so that we can start implementing some of the many things discussed,” Trump said.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said that meeting may come this fall.

“President Trump asked (National Security Advisor John Bolton) to invite President Putin to Washington in the fall and those discussions are already underway,” Sanders tweeted.

The invitation came as an apparent surprise to the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats when he was told about it during a live interview at the Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Colorado.

“Say that again?” Coats asked the interviewer.

“OK. That’s going to be special,” he said, laughing.

‘I don’t know what happened’
Coats also said that three days after Trump met with Putin he does not know what the two men discussed.

“I don’t know what happened in that meeting,” he said.

The two leaders held two hours of closed-door talks with no one else present but the interpreters.

“If he had asked me how that ought to be conducted, I would have suggested a different way,” Coats said.

Trump on Thursday listed the topics discussed as “stopping terrorism, security for Israel, nuclear proliferation, cyber attacks, trade, Ukraine, Middle East peace, North Korea and more.”

The top Senate Democrat, Chuck Schumer, had a scathing reaction to news that Trump planned to invite Putin to Washington.

“Until we know what happened at that two hour meeting in Helsinki, the president should have no more one-on-one interactions with Putin. In the United States, in Russia, or anywhere else,” he said in a statement.

The US upper chamber issued a sharp rebuke to Trump earlier in the day, voting 98-0 to oppose any move by his administration to make US officials available for questioning by Russian government officials.

Asked in Helsinki whether he would extradite 12 Russian intelligence agents indicted in the United States for hacking Democratic Party computers, Putin said he could meet the US government “halfway.”

Putin said he would permit the 12 to be questioned inside Russia if the United States allowed Russia to question former US envoy to Russia Michael McFaul and 11 others in Moscow’s case against billionaire investor and human rights activist William Browder, the driving force behind Magnitsky Act sanctions on Russian officials passed by the US Congress.

Trump initially called it an “incredible offer,” but McFaul and others expressed outrage and the White House — just minutes before the Senate vote — made clear a deal with Putin was not in the cards.

“It is a proposal that was made in sincerity by President Putin, but President Trump disagrees with it,” Sanders said.

“Hopefully President Putin will have the 12 identified Russians come to the United States to prove their innocence or guilt,” she added.

‘Misjudging Putin’
The indictments of the 12 Russians were issued by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

According to opinion polls published Thursday, a large majority of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of the summit — but members of his party approved by a wide margin.

While just one third of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the Putin summit, that number rose to 68 percent among Republicans, according to a CBS poll.

Among Republicans expressing concern was Senator Lindsey Graham, a prominent voice on foreign policy.

Trump wasn’t “prepared as well as he should have been” for the meeting, Graham said, adding that it is “imperative that he understand that he is misjudging Putin.”

In Moscow, Putin slammed Trump’s domestic opponents as “pathetic, worthless people” who were “ready to sacrifice Russian-American relations for their own ambitions.”

In a toughly-worded speech to Russian diplomats, Putin said US-Russia ties were by “some parameters” worse than during the Cold War.


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As more and more countries dump the US dollar for other national currencies, the dollar and the US are becoming increasingly isolated.

In order to avert a sudden dollar collapse, the US has taken robust measures in the past to avoid this, and went as far as militarily attacking countries that dumped the dollar.

Iran’s decision on April 18 to dump the dollar makes an American military onslaught on the country all the more likely if we look at recent history.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had announced that Iraq would no longer sell its oil in US dollars just prior to the US launching its regime change mission in 2003. The US had pushed for a no-fly zone over Iraq which was a tactical move that led to air superiority over Iraq, and the overthrow of the regime. The same tactic was used in Libya some years later.

In 2011, NATO militarily attacked Libya, enforcing a no-fly zone over the country, to thwart Libyan leader Muamar Gaddafi’s attempt to create a gold-backed African currency in dinars. Gadaffi had an estimated 150 tons of gold, and had also pushed African and Middle Eastern governments to also dump the dollar.

In 2011, Editor of the Daily Bell Anthony Wile had written that the central banking Ponzi scheme requires an ever increasing base of demand and the immediate silencing of those who would threaten its existence. According to analysts at the time, if Libya and other nations were to dump the greenback, it had the potential of bringing down the dollar and even the world monetary system. This concern had led former French President Nicolas Sarkozy to call Libya a threat to the financial security of the world.

Gaddafi had almost as much silver reserves as he had gold, which meant his idea of creating an African currency posed a serious threat to the French franc (CFA), which was the main currency in West Africa. Even when former president of the Ivory Coast Laurent Gbagbo had planned to move away from the CFA and wanted to encourage other West African nations to do so, the hand of the French was evident in his removal from power. For years he was held by the International Criminal Court without charge.

There is no question that the West wanted both Iraq and Libya’s oil, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was the insistence on moving away from the US dollar.

Syria is yet another example of a country that in 2006 had switched the primary hard currency it used for foreign goods and services from the dollar to the euro, to make it less vulnerable to pressure from Washington. In US foreign policy circles, the fact that Syria had strong relations with Cuba, Venezuela, Argentina, Iran, Russia and China was already problematic, but moving away from the dollar was intolerable.

As former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton later admitted, the US poured arms and cash into the hands of Sunni rebels in a proxy war that continues today.

On April 16, Turkey decided to repatriate all the gold it had in the US in a move to dump the dollar. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that everyone should be trading in gold. This was a major blow to the US economy given that Turkey is the 11th largest gold holder with 591 tons of gold worth US$23 billion. The fear of the US is that this will lead to a domino effect that will not only affect US leadership in the global economy, but bring down the US economy itself.

Two days later on April 18, Iran decided to dump the dollar and use the euro. President Hassan Rouhani and his cabinet decided the euro will be used when giving the Rial’s exchange rate in all official statements and acts.

What was the reaction to that?

Exactly three weeks later President Donald Trump announced the US was pulling out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. This was vociferously resisted by the Europeans who are refusing to be dictated to by US foreign policy whims. France has even said it will start offering euro denominated credits to buyers from Iran for goods made in France. It is all so hypocritical when one considers that Iran has consistently kept to its side of the nuclear deal according to the IAEA, and Iran has never invaded anyone in its history.

But the US has more than just Turkey and Iran’s recent announcements to worry about. Last year China rolled out a payment versus payment system for Russian ruble and Chinese yuan transactions. Earlier this year Pakistan announced that it is replacing the dollar with the yuan for trade with Beijing. If more countries follow suit what we may see is a US recession at best, and certain global economic turmoil.