Shortly before his call for peace Trump sent another Twitter missive: "Russia must be laughing up their sleeves watching as the U.S. tears itself apart over a Democrat EXCUSE for losing the election".
The photos show Trump laughing with Lavrov and the ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak.
"Syria is specifically why Putin asked [the president] to take a meeting with Lavrov", the official said.
Having met with the foreign ministers of Ukraine and Russian Federation the day before, U.S. President Donald Trump commented on those meetings on his Twitter page.
Veteran diplomats questioned why Trump agreed to host the diplomats - a rare honour for non-heads of state, much less for those at the centre of major U.S. political scandal.
During the campaign, Sessions, who was then a US senator, and Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page also met with Kislyak - as did Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.
They added, however, that Washington was lenient regarding "the method and the timing of Assad's exit" from Syria and said Trump's administration accepts those matters to be managed by Moscow, including a possibility that Russian Federation hosts Assad in return of a USA pledge that he would not be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court. "Huge coup", said former United States ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul.
Trump "raised the possibility of broader cooperation on resolving conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere", according to a White House statement.
Sanders added that it was "proper protocol" to close a meeting to the press when Trump is meeting with a foreign official who is not a head of state.
In an interview with NBC, trump suggested that the discussion with Russian foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will ultimately save many people from death.
Officials said that Vladimir Putin had requested the meeting, a quid-pro-quo for his recent face-to-face with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in Moscow. And Kislyak was not mentioned in the official White House readout of the meeting.
"Our official photographer and their official photographer were present, that's it", said one aide shortly after the meeting.
Federal Bureau of Investigation oath says any individual loyalty pledge can lead 'to tyranny'
But in an interview on Thursday, Trump said he was planning to fire Comey regardless of what the Justice Department recommended. Democrats cast the decision to fire Comey as an effort to obstruct the FBI's probe, a charge the White House has denied.
"We later learned that the White House - by their own admission - was misled", Brennan said.
As they ate, the president and Mr. Comey made small talk about the election and the crowd sizes at Mr. Trump's rallies. "We had an official photographer in the room, as did they", spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Thursday.
Tass photographer Alexandr Scherbak claimed on Facebook Thursday that he covered the meeting as part of the Russian Foreign Ministry press pool.
The photographer involved - Alexandr Scherbak - also took to Facebook to address what he called the "hysteria around my photo shoot", which raised hackles among USA media denied access to the meeting.
The Russians used the photos to troll the White House in its social media posts Wednesday.
He said: "I'm being branded as this bad Russian Federation person - which is completely false". "We worked for just a minute and that's all".
The White House is facing criticism for a possible security breach after it allowed a Russian news service photographer into the Oval Office to snap photos of President Donald Trump and a pair of top Russian officials.
Rogers told the hearing he had not been consulted beforehand. But this time, he was there in the Oval Office, and Moscow clearly wanted those images out there.
His campaign faces a slew of investigations about whether it colluded with the Kremlin to derail Hillary Clinton's presidential bid.
President Donald Trump lashed out in a series of tweets Friday morning amid a firestorm over the abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey, defending the shifting narrative and timeline his administration has offered for the decision.
"I could have done without the attention" Kislyak told AFP recently.
The White House also changed its narrative about whether the president had chose to fire Mr Comey based on the recommendations by Mr Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
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