https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5963487/Trump-defends-Putin-emergency-statement-party-leaders-condemn-him.html
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Trump's darkest day: Defiant president calls Putin summit a 'great success' - hours after he tried to end the crisis by saying he DOES believe Russia meddled in 2016, but was cut off by John Kelly turning off the lights
Trump made the first major climbdown of his presidency Tuesday over his press conference with Putin - but with a truculent tone and a dig at his own spies
He then tweeted on Tuesday night calling his Putin summit a 'great success'
His own party had flamed him over his equivalence of U.S. intelligence agencies with Putin's denial at Helsinki press conference
Reading from a prepared statement he said he misspoke when he stood beside Vladimir Putin and said he 'saw no reason why it would be' Russia
'The sentence should have been, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be Russia,' Trump said. 'I think that probably clarifies things pretty good by itself'
Trump said he was surprised by the firestorm that awaited him when he arrived on Monday in Washington and realized he needed to 'clear up' his comments
=Statement, at a White House round table with Republicans, took surreal twist as John Kelly, Trump's chief of staff, turned out the lights by mistake=
Then Trump quipped: 'That must be the intelligence agencies'
Even allies of the president were telling him on Tuesday that he needed to 'reverse course' and issue a clarification
He scrawled a misspelled addition to the script saying: 'there was no collusion'
But some television commentators compared it to a 'hostage video' - setting up the possibility of further angry backlash from Trump against the coverage