President Trump’s bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin ran for more than two hours Friday, far longer than the 30 minutes it had been scheduled for.
The White House press pool reported that, in all, the meeting lasted two hours and 16 minutes.
It wasn’t immediately clear what the two leaders discussed in the highly anticipated meeting on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.
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The meeting was strictly limited in its participants, with only Trump, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Putin, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and two interpreters allowed in the room.
In public remarks before going into the closed meeting, Trump told Putin that it was “an honor to be with you.” Putin replied: “I’m delighted to meet you.”
The bilateral meeting — the first between the two leaders — was closely watched in the U.S. Trump is facing numerous investigations back in Washington into Russia’s role in the 2016 election, as well as possible coordination between his campaign and Russia.
Both Trump and the Kremlin have denied those allegations, but Democratic lawmakers tried to pressure the president to bring up the hacking during the face-to-face.
Other possible topics of discussion were the ongoing conflicts in Syria and eastern Ukraine, both of which find Moscow and Washington on opposing sides.