The White House has said President Donald Trump had instructed his national security adviser to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to visit Washington later this year.
"President Trump asked @AmbJohnBolton to invite President Putin to Washington in the fall and those discussions are already underway," Press Secretary Sarah Sanders tweeted, three days after the Finland summit between the US and Russian leaders.
Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was speaking at the Aspen Security Forum when a moderator broke into the conversation to announce the invitation.
"Say that again," Mr Coats said, before taking a breath and saying: "OK". He smiled and said: "That's going to be special."
Mr Coats also said that three days after Mr Trump met with the Russian leader he does not know what the two men discussed.
"I don't know what happened in that meeting," he said.
Yesterday, the president said he looked forward to a second meeting with the Russian leader, although details remain sketchy about what was accomplished during the Helsinki summit.
“The Summit with Russia was a great success, except with the real enemy of the people, the Fake News Media,” Mr Trump posted to Twitter.
“I look forward to our second meeting so that we can start implementing some of the many things discussed, including stopping terrorism, security for Israel, nuclear proliferation, cyber attacks, trade, Ukraine, Middle East peace, North Korea and more. There are many answers, some easy and some hard, to these problems . . . but they can ALL be solved!”
In an interview with CNBC television, he said he was "getting along with President Putin, getting along with Russia's a positive, not a negative".
"Now with that being said if it doesn't work out I'll be the worst enemy he's ever had."
Mr Trump has come under fire since the summit for not challenging Mr Putin over Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. The US president was forced to walk back his initial comments it was unlikely Russian had been involved in meddling with the election, despite contrary information provided by US intelligence agencies.
The US leader later said he misspoke after he appeared to take Putin's denial of interference at face value and said he accepted the US intelligence community's view that Moscow sought to influence the 2016 vote.
"I thought it would be obvious but I would like to clarify just in case it wasn't. In a key sentence in my remarks, I said the word 'would' instead of 'wouldn't'," Trump said in an extraordinary postscript to the Helsinki conference on Tuesday.
"The sentence should have been, 'I don't see any reason why I wouldn't, or why it wouldn't be Russia.'"
However, Mr Putin has reportedly warned the world he would be "Vladimir Putin's worst enemy" if the US-Russia relationship didn't work out.
Mr Putin also came out swinging, slamming "forces" in the US willing to sacrifice Russian-US ties.
"We see that there are forces in the US that are easily ready to sacrifice Russian-American relations for their own ambitions," Putin said in a speech to Russian ambassadors gathered in Moscow.
"We see that there are forces in the US that put their narrow party interests higher than national ones," Putin went on to say.
There is no word on when the second summit would take place, with neither the White House or Kremlin formally making an announcement.
