All of Trump's national security advisors went into a full damage control scramble this morning, and the best they could come up with was to trot Trump out and have him read this a full 24 hours after the original statement he made:
"I thought that I made myself very clear, but having just reviewed the transcript...I realized that there is a need for some clarification. The sentence should have been...'I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be Russia'."
First of all, that makes no sense whatsoever. The entire rest of the press conference was him talking about how Putin made such a strong denial, how the investigation into the election attack had damaged US/Russia relations, how he doesn't see Putin as an enemy but a competitor and that's a compliment...
If he wants to change that one single sentence now, that only puts it in direct contradiction to the entire body of his other remarks at the summit. So pretending that somehow fixed his problem is crazy.
Not to mention if you don't ignore the sentence immediately before the one he is trying to retroactively reweite it makes even LESS sense.
"I have President Putin; he just said it's not Russia. I will say this: I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be."
That is just tortured.
But if that wasn't enough, Trump is clearly so far under Putin's thumb that he barely even paused to take a breath after finishing reading his script before he clearly panicked and threw in an ad lib From earlier in his statement there was this:
"I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election took place. It could be other people also. There’s a lot of people out there. "
That bolded bit on the end is clearly 100% pure Trump shooting off his mouth off script. He made it ONE SECOND before walking back his own walk back.
I can only imagine his entire national security team putting dents in their desks with their foreheads about now.