President Joe Biden finished up his post-Vladimir Putin summit press conference with a flash of visible irritation at a question posed by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
As he was leaving the makeshift stage in Geneva, Collins asked him, “Why are you so confident he will change his behavior, Mr. President?”
Biden responded, “I am not confident he will change his behavior. Where the hell…What do you do all the time? When did I say I was confident? I said …what I said was, let’s get it straight, I said what will change their behavior is if the rest of the world reacts to them and it diminishes their standing in the world. I am not confident of anything. I am just stating the facts.”
But Collins went on. “But given his past behavior has not changed and in that press conference after sitting down with you for several hours, he denied any involvement in cyberattacks. He downplayed human rights abuses. He even refused to say Alexey Navalny’s name. So how does that account to a constructive meeting, as President Putin put it?”
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"What Are You So Afraid Of?": ABC News' Rachel Scott Presses Vladimir Putin On Death, Imprisonment Of Political OpponentsBiden responded, “If you don’t understand that, you are in the wrong business.”
Later, before he boarded Air Force One for his flight back to Washington, he spoke to reporters and said, “I shouldn’t have been such a wiseguy for the answer I gave.”
During the press conference, Biden called on a list of pre-selected reporters, trying to both show that the summit had achieved its objectives — “I did what I came to do” — and to show that this was a much different relationship with Putin than the Russian leader had with Trump.
“There was a hype around this meeting but it was pretty straightforward to me,” he said.
Biden defended the shorter than expected length, saying that the two leaders had already run through the list of issues they wanted to address. “After two hours there we looked at each other like, ‘OK, what happens next?'”
Before he got on Air Force One, Biden told reporters, “I really do think, not me, but we, the country has put a different face on where we have been and where we are going.”
