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REUTERS
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE
ON the eve of his meeting with Russia's Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump rattled allies once more by labelling the European Union a"foe" with regard to trade.
In a pre-summit interview with CBS News'"Face the Nation" programme aired on Sunday, Trump lumped in the EU with China and Russia as US economic adversaries."I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade," he said.
Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, replied on Twitter using one of Trump's favourite stock phrases.
"America and the EU are best friends," Tusk wrote."Whoever says we are foes is spreading fake news."
Trump and Putin will meet on Monday in Helsinki for their first stand-alone meeting since Trump took office in January 2017. Trump departed for Helsinki on Sunday evening after spending the day playing golf at his private club in Scotland.
Trump and his aides have been working through the weekend to soften expectations for tangible results from the meeting.
"I go in with low expectations," Trump told CBS in the same interview."I'm not going with high expectations."
John Bolton, Trump's national security adviser, said in an interview with ABC's"This Week" that the United States would not be looking for"deliverables" and that the meeting would be"unstructured," beginning with a one-on-one session between the two leaders.
"It isn't a summit," US Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman told NBC'S"Meet the Press."
"It's a meeting ... This is an attempt to see if we can defuse and take some of the drama, and quite frankly some of the danger, out of the relationship right now." The meeting comes just days after 12 Russian intelligence officers were charged by a US federal grand jury for hacking the Democrats ahead of the 2016 election.
With that in mind, a senior House of Representatives Republican told CBS's"Face the Nation" that Trump should ask Putin in Helsinki which airport the Russian hackers will be extradited to for being taken into US custody.
"Tell us where you're going to extradite those folks," said Representative Trey Gowdy, who chaired a raucous House investigative hearing on Thursday that highlighted bitter, partisan divisions within the US Congress over a probe of Russian election meddling that has clouded Trump's presidency.
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16/07/2018
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