US President Donald Trump told The New York Times that he and Russia's president Vladimir Putin discussed adoption when they huddled on the sidelines of the G-20 in Germany last month.
"I actually talked about Russian adoption with him. Which is interesting because it was a part of the conversation that Don had in that meeting," Trump said.
Trump said the conversation occurred during what he characterized as a 15-minute series of "pleasantries" with Putin on the sidelines of a dinner for all the world leaders in attendance. That meeting was only disclosed this week, and Trump has since worked to downplay the significance of the separate talk.
Adoption — and therefore the correlated sanctions — were also the subject that Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., says was on the agenda when a group of Kremlin-connected officials met with him in Trump Tower last year.
Though the younger Trump later disclosed he had expected the Russians to deliver incriminating information about Hillary Clinton, one of the meeting participants — lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya — has been advocating for the United States to rescind its 2012 sanctions, Trump told the Times he was unaware of his son's meeting when he discussed the issue with Putin in Germany.
