Russian govt denies interfering with the U.S election after Hillary Clinton's emails are hacked revealing damaging information
Russia has denied
interfering with the U.S presidential elections after Hillary Clinton campaign
/Democratic party emails were hacked.
Wikileaks' Julian
Assange released series of hacked emails potentially damaging to the Clinton
campaign which made the Clinton campaign and the White House immediately
release statements blaming Russia for the hacks with the White House promising
to give a 'proportional' response instead of denying the contents of the mails.
The hacked mails reveal
that the Clinton Campaign shared information with the U.S Department of Justice
as regards her 36,000 mails deleted from her private server, the mails also show
her supporting open trade deals but criticize open trade deals in public during
rallies.
The mails also reveal
that Hillary Clinton chose her running mate Tim Kaine over a year ago and not
as recently as she made the public to believe.
Wikileaks Julian Assange
has reportedly promised to release more mails in the coming days but Russia's
foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has denied Russia's involvement in
America's political sphere.
In an interview with
CNN's Christiane Amanpour in Moscow, Lavrov said it was "flattering"
that American officials think Russia is meddling in the election, but the
accusations were baseless.
"It's flattering,
of course, to get this kind of attention -- for a regional power, as President
Obama called us some time ago," Lavrov told CNN on Wednesday.
"Now everybody in
the United States is saying that it is Russia which is running the [U.S.]
presidential debate," he said. "We have not seen a single fact, a
single proof."
On the recent lewd
remarks on Donald Trump made in a recently released 2005 video, Lavrov
remarked, after pointing out English was not his first language,
"There are so many
p**sies around your presidential campaign on both sides that I prefer not to
comment."
Asked about this
threatened response by the American government on Russia for the email hacks,
Lavrov said: "It's not worth, I believe, speculating. If they decided to
do something, let them do it. But to say that Russia is interfering in the
United States' domestic matters, is ridiculous."
Many Americans, since
the mail leaks, have called on Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta
to resign but he said it was "a reasonable conclusion, that… the
Trump campaign had advance warning about what Assange was going to do."
''WikiLeaks seems to be
doing everything they can on behalf of our opponent,"
Russia's president
Vladmir Putin has also revealed that influencing the American election is not
one of Russia's interests.
"There was a whole
hysteria about that being of interest to Russia, but there is nothing within
the interest of Russia," Putin said, speaking at an investment forum in
Moscow on Wednesday.
Putin said he didn't see
why Russia was a "main issue in the election campaign," and that it
was "gratifying but puzzling."
In a joint statement,
the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence said the intelligence community is "confident" the hacks
and documents published by WikiLeaks and DCLeaks.com and those claimed to have
been carried out by a hacker known as Guccifer 2.0 are "consistent with
the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts."
"These thefts and
disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process. Such
activity is not new to Moscow – the Russians have used similar tactics and
techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion
there," the statement reads. "We believe, based on the scope and
sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could
have authorized these activities."
"It would be
extremely difficult for someone, including a nation-state actor, to alter
actual ballot counts or election results by cyber attack or intrusion,"
they said. "This assessment is based on the decentralized nature of our
election system in this country and the number of protections state and local
election officials have in place."
Source: CNN / Fox News
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