He Said, He Said: Russian Foreign Minister Says Trump Didn’t Warn About Election Interference, Pompeo Says He Did

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are having a public disagreement over whether President Donald Trump warned Russia against interfering in U.S. elections during a private meeting.

At a joint press conference Tuesday following a meeting at the State Department, Pompeo said he told Lavrov that Russian election interference is “unacceptable,” while Lavrov called the well-documented evidence of Russian interference “baseless.”

Later Tuesday afternoon, Trump and Pompeo met with Lavrov at the White House. According to the official White House readout of the meeting, “President Trump warned against any Russian attempts to interfere in United States elections and urged Russia to resolve the conflict with Ukraine.”

But during his own press conference following the White House meeting, Lavrov gave an account that conflicted with the administration’s official story, claiing he was the one who raised the issue by way of complaint over Pompeo’s earlier remarks.

The New York Times’ Edward Wong asked Lavrov “The White House just put out a statement about your meeting with President Trump saying that the president did warn about, warn you not to interfere in US elections and also urged you to try and settle your conflict in the situation with Ukraine. I was just wondering if you did discuss these two items, and if so can you tell us about the discussion?”

“No, we did not discuss the election,” Lavrov said.

Later in the same press conference, Bloomberg News’ Nick Wadhams told Lavrov that “The White House issued a readout that explicitly said President Trump warned you against any Russian interference in US elections,” and asked “Are you saying that that warning was not delivered?”

“I did not read the White House’s comments about our meeting, we’ll issue our comments, you can read it,” Lavrov said, then added “State Secretary Pompeo mentioned this, that the U.S. warned Russia against interfering in the U.S. election process.”

“I responded to that, and I told it to Donald Trump that state secretary mentioned this issue publicly, and I responded publicly again that we proposed to the current administration to publish the transcripts of our communication” with the Obama administration on issues of election security. He went on to claim that the Trump administration refuses to release those materials.

On Wednesday morning, Pompeo held a briefing at the State Department, and was confronted with Lavrov’s remarks, about which both Pompeo and the reporter laughed aloud.

Pompeo said discussions of Russian interference “happened in every meeting I was in.”

“I will leave to the White House to give the details of what was said, I never talk about what the president says in those private settings,” Pompeo said. “But I can tell you that Foreign Minister Lavrov’s statement is not accurately a reflection of my recollection of that meeting.”

“And there was no mistake that President Trump made clear in the meeting that he had with Foreign Minister Lavrov — and the rest of the Russian team that was there — that President Trump personally and America finds their meddling in our elections unacceptable in the very same way that I had said it earlier to Foreign Minister Lavrov,” Pompeo said.

Unless a transcript or a recording of the meeting is released, Americans will have to decide whether to take the word of a propagandist, or the other guy.

Watch the clip above, via Fox News.