in-town pool 12 initial quotes from trump aoun meeting

With tremendous thanks to fellow pooler Haley Bull:

ON LEBANON

President Trump praised Lebanon’s president and said “the relationship is very good. I think that Lebanon has been a very mistreated country for a long period of time.” He said “we’re gonna help it a lot.”

“We've already met a couple of times, and we've had some good meetings, and we are going to solve a lot of problems. We've already solved some of them for Lebanon. As you know there's a Hezbollah problem, but we've done some things that I think the world will take notice.”

Trump says they’ll be speaking about help for the Lebanese army. “We have some very concrete plans already in store for that, with others going in and helping. But they're also becoming much more self-sufficient, and we will be speaking about that.

On Israeli redeployment, Trump says “they’re in the process of doing that.”

President Trump when asked if he would push Lebanon on a “1955 law criminalizing contact with Israel for over 70 years” as he works to expand the Abraham Accords, says “I will. The Abraham Accords have been, I think, a tremendous success. I think you're going to see a lot of countries joining pretty soon. As you know, we have our original group, and it's so successful for them, economically successful. It's been that nobody left, even during this time of conflict. So no, I think Lebanon has a very important place.”

Bart Jansen

White House correspondent

USA TODAY