Vladimir Putin wants you to know that the Russian government absolutely, totally, positively did not conspire to steal Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016 and use them to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. And even if they did—well, if you think about it, wasn’t it Hillary’s fault for sending such damaging emails in the first place?
The Russian president offered this perplexing defense of his nation’s conduct in an interview that aired on Fox News Monday evening, mere hours after President Trump refused to denounce Russia’s election meddling during a joint press conference with Putin in Helsinki.
“Russia as a state has never interfered with the internal affairs of the United States, let alone its elections,” Putin said, before adding: “The idea was about hacking an email account of a Democratic candidate. Was it some forgery of facts? That’s the important point that I am trying to make. Was this any false information planted? No it wasn’t … The info that I’m aware of, there is nothing false about it, every single grain of it is true. And the Democratic leadership admitted it.”
Putin’s eyebrow-raising comments were made as part of a lengthy, frequently tense interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace, during which the Russian president also categorically denied accusations that he had perpetrated human rights abuses in his country, defended Russia’s invasion of Ukrainian Crimea in 2014, and laughed off the notion that Trump has been soft toward Russia because the Kremlin possesses damaging information about him.
“I don’t want to insult President Trump when I say this—and I may come as rude—but before he announced that he will run for presidency, he was of no interest to us,” Putin said. “He was a rich person, but there is plenty of rich persons in the United States. He was in the construction business. He organized the beauty pageants. But no, it never occurred to anyone that he would run for president.”
At one particularly fraught moment, Wallace produced a copy of the indictment special counsel Robert Mueller filed last Friday against 12 Russian intelligence officers for conspiring to hack into the computers of Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. As Wallace read a summary of the charges, Putin began to chuckle visibly. Wallace then tried to hand him a copy of the indictment. The two men looked at one another for a few uncomfortable seconds, Wallace’s arm extended, packet in hand. The Russian president then indicated he should set it on the table.
“I’m not interested in this issue a single bit,” he said of the Mueller probe. “That’s the internal political games of the United States. Don’t hold the relationship of Russia and the United States hostage to this internal political struggle.”
