HR McMaster refuses to say if Trump pressed Russia on election interference

Donald Trump’s national security adviser refused to say on Sunday whether the president used his recent Oval Office meeting with Russian officials to confront them about interference in the 2016 election.

“Well you know, there already was too much that’s been leaked from those meetings,” HR McMaster said, in an appearance on ABC’s The Week.

Trump reportedly did use the meeting to disparage the FBI director he fired the day before, James Comey, as a “nutjob”. According to the New York Times, citing a document from the meeting provided by an unnamed White House source, Trump told the Russians that the “great pressure” he faced because of Russia had been “taken off” by the firing of Comey.

The FBI director had been overseeing the investigation of Russian election interference and possible links between Trump aides and Russian agents. The Times report and others, and the appointment of Robert Mueller to special counsel, contributed to rising speculation about whether the president might be guilty of obstruction of justice, a potentially impeachable offense.

The Republican chair of the House oversight committee, Jason Chaffetz, said Trump should have taken a forceful line with the Russians.

“You would like the president to beat them over the head” about election interference, he told ABC, to make clear that “if they actually did interfere in any way, shape, or form, how wrong that is and how outraged America is on both sides of the aisle”.

Chaffetz, who said he would meet Comey on Monday, joined with his Democratic committee counterpart Elijah Cummings to say he would subpoena any notes from the Oval Office meeting.

Dianne Feinstein, a Democratic member of the Senate intelligence committee, told CBS’s Face the Nation that Trump’s reported remark was “a horrible thing for a president to say. Former director Comey is in no way, shape, or form a nut job. He’s a very strong man.”

Comey is due to testify to the Senate intelligence committee in an open hearing after the Memorial Day weekend. Marco Rubio, a Republican member of that panel, told CNN’s State of the Union he wanted to hear directly from Comey if he felt he had been put in a position “where he couldn’t do his job”.

Republican senator John McCain, meanwhile, told Fox News Sunday he was shocked that the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, had been allowed inside the Oval Office at all, and that reports of what was said left him “almost speechless”.

McMaster was pressed on the “apparent contradiction [between] the president disparaging the person who is investigating the Russians but not confronting the Russians who interfered in our election”. In response, he would only say that the meeting should have stayed confidential.

“Those meetings, as you know, are supposed to be privileged,” the retired general said. “They’re supposed to be confidential. They’re supposed to allow the president and other leaders to have frank exchanges.”

US media were kept out of the Oval Office meeting but Russia state media quickly published photographs of Trump, Lavrov and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, showing the president shaking hands with a grinning Lavrov. A senior Trump administration official told reporters the White House had been misled about the role of the Russian photographer who was present.

McMaster said summary notes of Trump’s meeting, of the kind leaked to the media, could not accurately capture the full context of the conversation.

“It’s very difficult to take a few lines, to take a paragraph out … and to be able to see the full context of the conversation,” he said.

After it was reported that Trump had spoken to the Russians about highly classified intelligence material, McMaster appeared outside the White House to give a denial that the president subsequently contradicted.

Asked on Sunday about comments to the press from a friend and former colleague that he had been placed in “an impossible situation because the president expects you to defend the indefensible”, McMaster disagreed.

“I don’t think I’m in an impossible situation,” he said. “I find no difficulty at all serving our nation and serving the president in my current capacity.”

The secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who was also in the Oval Office meeting, also defended Trump’s behavior. Asked about the reported comments in an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Tillerson said nothing indicated that the president “seemed to be saying that firing Comey would help remove one of the distractions” to his relationship with Russia.

“My takeaway from that conversation was not that point at all,” Tillerson said. “I think, again, the president was simply saying to the Russians these issues at home are not going to get in the way of my effort and the effort of my government to see if we can find a way to move this relationship forward.”

Tillerson reiterated his claim that officials in other countries did not care about Trump’s controversies at home. Foreign ministers and heads of state “do not have the time to pay attention to what’s happening domestically here”, he said.

Fox host Chris Wallace countered that ambassadors in Washington had told him the opposite: that they were “deeply concerned with the investigation into the president and question, wonder, whether it’s going to somehow prevent the US from meeting its challenges around the world”.