Russian govt denies interfering with the U.S election after Hillary Clinton's emails are hacked revealing damaging information
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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