Concerned about potential Russian meddling in mid-terms: Trump

US President Donald Trump has he is "very concerned" about potential Russian interference in the mid-term legislative elections to be held in November.

"I'm very concerned that Russia will be fighting very hard to have an impact on the upcoming Election," Trump said on Twitter on Tuesday, referring to the mid-term election, in which all 435 seats in the US House of Representatives and a third of the Senate seats will be up for grabs, Efe news reported.

The President also claimed that Moscow will be pushing hard to get Democrats elected.

"Based on the fact that no President has been tougher on Russia than me, they will be pushing very hard for the Democrats. They definitely don't want Trump!" he declared in the same Twitter post.

Since his July 16 summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Trump has changed his public stance several times regarding Russia's election interference and the US intelligence services.

At a joint press conference with Putin, Trump discredited the findings of US intelligence agencies, who have determined that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

A few days after making the statement that he did not see why Russia would have interfered in the election, Trump backtracked and said that he had "misspoken" in the Finnish capital and that he did accept the "conclusions" of the US spy agencies.

The President thus tried to calm the tidal wave of criticism he had received, even from within the heart of the Republican Party, for apparently not standing up to Putin and asserting that he believed the assessments of the US intelligence agencies.

--IANS

pgh/