The Washington Times: Russian President Vladimir Putin personally denied his government played any part in the recent U.S. Democratic National Committee hack during an interview published Friday, while dismissing what he described as attempts to distract the public from the information contained in the thousands of DNC emails that were subsequently leaked online.
Mr. Putin rejected the claims while fielding questions Thursday during an interview with Bloomberg that has since been published on the Kremlin’s official website.
“Listen, does it even matter who hacked this data?” Mr. Putin asked of the DNC breach. “The important thing is the content that was given to the public.”
“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,” Russia’s president added. “But I want to tell you again, I don’t know anything about it, and on a state level, Russia has never done this.”
Federal investigators in the U.S. haven’t formally named the culprit responsible for the DNC hack, but cybersecurity experts and lawmakers alike have largely blamed Russia since that breach was first publicly revealed in July. Antisecrecy website WikiLeaks soon after published internal correspondence pilfered in the hack, and discussions contained therein have been attributed with the subsequent ousting of the party’s former chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Other organizations and individuals affiliated with the Democratic Party have routinely been targeted with cyberattacks in the interim, and the FBI has determined with “high confidence” that those are being waged as part of an operation conducted on behalf of the Russian government, Bloomberg reported last month citing an anonymous source.
