During an appearance on Russia Today, a television network funded by the Russian government, Donald Trump said Thursday that it was “pretty unlikely” that the Kremlin is interfering in the 2016 election, though U.S. intelligence officials have claimed otherwise.
“It’s probably unlikely,” Trump told host Larry King during his show, Politicking. “Maybe the Democrats are putting that out, who knows?”
Trump said that he had “no opinion” on Russian president Vladimir Putin’s assertion that the July breach into the Democratic party’s servers was “a public service.”
“I have absolutely no opinion on that,” he said, and later added that a Russian-led hack to sway the 2016 election “would not be appropriate at all.”
U.S. intelligence agencies have said that they have “high confidence” Russia orchestrated the breach into the Democratic National Committee’s emails, which occurred days before the Democratic National Convention. The FBI is currently investigating the hack, though Putin has denied playing any role.
Trump has on several occasions praised Putin as a great leader, despite his support of the Assad regime in Syria, his illegal annexation of Crimea, and his incursion into Ukraine.
“I’ve already said, he is really very much of a leader. I mean, you can say, ‘Oh, isn’t that a terrible thing—the man has very strong control over a country,'” Trump said Wednesday. “It’s a very different system and I don’t happen to like the system, but certainly, in that system, he’s been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader.”
The Republican nominee noted that Putin has “an 82 percent approval rating,” apparently referring to polling by the Levada Center, one of the last remaining independent pollsters in Russia. The Levada Center was this week labeled a “foreign agent” by the Russian government, a status that could lead to the organization’s imminent demise.
Trump’s campaign staff have also been criticized for their ties to Russia.
The businessman’s ex-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who left amidst mounting allegations of his ties to the Kremlin, for years lobbied on behalf of Ukrainian president and Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych. During Manafort’s tenure, the campaign led an effort to scale back the Republican party platform on sending arms to Ukraine in their ongoing fight against Russian-backed rebels.
