This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, July 16, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have had their meeting in Helsinki.

The post-meeting news conference has been called disastrous, even treasonous.

Chris Preble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, comments.

This meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, there was a lot that led up to it, in particular an indictment of several

Russian people who were believed to have played a role in attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election,

this massive indictment that came out just before this meeting

was conducted in secret and the press conference that many people are just

really very much up in arms about with respect to how little Donald Trump did to sort of backup US intelligence agencies and also in public make statements about Russia's role in trying to influence the election.

Well I think the two things go together, Caleb. I think that the fact that we are mostly focused on the credible allegations of Russian

interference in the 2016 elections that have the stories have been around for some time the indictment

handed down on Friday by Robert Mueller is sort of the most thoroughgoing in terms of

connecting to the Russian government, not merely Russian individuals, and maps out the potential for

this linking up to people close to the, at least close to the Trump campaign. We'll wait to see how that plays out. But

precisely because that indictment was handed down, we have much more information and

and not so surprisingly all of the questions from

nearly all the questions from the US press at the press conference were

relating to that and so when President Trump repeated what he has many times over, sort of

casting doubt on the impact of this interference, suggesting that it was there's just not much to it and he's

been inclined to do that from the very beginning he does not wish for the appearance of

Russian interference in the election to undermine legitimacy of his presidency,

which is how he's interpreted this story from the very beginning.

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