WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Wednesday denied Russia is still targeting the United States, a claim sharply at odds with recent warnings from his top intelligence chief about ongoing threats to election security.

Trump was asked at the end of a Cabinet meeting if Russia was still targeting the U.S. and answered “no” without elaborating.

In the aftermath of his Helsinki meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump asserted that no other American president has been as “tough” on Russia as he has been. He cited U.S. sanctions on Russia and the expulsion of alleged Russian spies from the U.S., telling reporters that Putin “understands it, and he’s not happy about it.”

Trump’s comments came a day after he walked back his public questioning of U.S. intelligence findings of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Those previous comments, delivered alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin at a summit press conference Monday, had prompted blistering, bipartisan criticism at home.

Trump took to Twitter early Wednesday to defend the meeting, promising “big results” from better relations with Russia and hitting back at “haters.”

Lawmakers from both parties have been sounding the alarm over fresh interference by Russia as they push to fortify U.S. election infrastructure ahead of the midterm elections.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said he can “guarantee” that the Russians will interfere with the next U.S. election.

He is pushing legislation with Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland to slap Russia or other countries with sanctions if they’re caught purchasing election ads, using social media to spread false information or disrupting election infrastructure.

Amid bipartisan condemnation of Trump’s embrace of a longtime U.S. enemy in Helsinki, the U.S. president delivered a rare admission of error Tuesday.

He backed away from his public undermining of American intelligence agencies, saying he misspoke when he said he saw no reason to believe Russia had interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.

“The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t, or why it wouldn’t be Russia’” instead of “why it would,” Trump said Tuesday of the comments he had made in Helsinki.

That didn’t explain why Trump, who had tweeted a half-dozen times and sat for two television interviews since the Putin news conference, waited so long to correct his remarks. And the scripted cleanup pertained only to the least defensible of his comments.

He didn’t reverse other statements in which he gave clear credence to Putin’s “extremely strong and powerful” denial of Russian involvement, raised doubts about his own intelligence agencies’ conclusions and advanced discredited conspiracy theories about election meddling.

“I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election took place,” Trump conceded Tuesday. But even then he made a point of adding, “It could be other people also. A lot of people out there. There was no collusion at all.”

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Trump was trying to “squirm away” from his comments alongside Putin.

“It’s 24 hours too late and in the wrong place,” he said.

On Capitol Hill, top Republican leaders said they were open to slapping fresh sanctions on Russia, but they showed no sign of acting any time soon.

“Let’s be very clear, just so everybody knows: Russia did meddle with our elections,” said House Speaker Paul Ryan, another steady Trump political ally. “What we intend to do is make sure they don’t get away with it again and also to help our allies.”