Putin Says Russia Didn't Hack DNC, but Nice Job

'Listen, does it even matter who hacked this data?'
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 2, 2016 9:35 AM CDT
Putin Says Russia Didn't Hack DNC, but Nice Job
He knows nothing, he says.   (Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Vladimir Putin gave a two-hour interview to Bloomberg from Vladivostok, Russia, Thursday, and he had some thoughts on the DNC email hack his country's been accused of having a hand in. WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 emails right before the Democratic National Convention in July, and they aired a bit of DNC dirty laundry that showed committee officials tried to throw Clinton rival Bernie Sanders under the bus. "I don't know anything about it, and on a state level Russia has never done this," Putin said of the cyberattack, though he doesn't seem upset it happened. "Listen, does it even matter who hacked this data?" he added. "The important thing is the content that was given to the public." Putin also said his government didn't have its "finger on the pulse" of American politics enough to even try to sway the US elections, per CNN.

Bloomberg, however, describes Putin's relationship with Clinton as "acrimonious" and notes the FBI has "high confidence" Moscow was behind the hack. Putin dismissed these claims and said going after the hackers was ridiculous. "There's no need to distract the public's attention from the essence of the problem by raising some minor issues connected with the search for who did it," he said. Meanwhile, RT.com reports that WikiLeaks is blasting a Thursday New York Times article claiming "the agendas of WikiLeaks and Mr. Putin have repeatedly dovetailed." In a statement posted on Twitter, WikiLeaks throws around calls of "deeply misleading" and "absurdly false" to many of the NYT allegations, noting that of the 650,000-plus articles WikiLeaks has published on Putin and Russia, "most" have been "critical." (More Vladimir Putin stories.)

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