Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., suggested Friday that Donald Trump is not telling the truth when he says no one knows who’s behind the recent hacking of the Democratic National Committee or the alleged hacking of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.
“I am on the Armed Services Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee and I get briefed all the time in those committees about what’s going on,” Clinton’s running mate said at a campaign stop Friday. “And as a candidate for vice president, I get security briefings just like Mike Pence, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump does.”
Kaine added, “Donald Trump has heard from the same intelligence officials who’ve spent their life serving this country, but he stands up and says, ‘Oh, there’s no evidence of this.'”
The Democratic nominee and her team maintain that the group WikiLeaks is working hand-in-hand with the Russians to swing the 2016 election in Trump’s favor, and they’ve used these claims to downplay the content of the hacked emails WikiLeaks has been publishing.
“What is really important about WikiLeaks is that the Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans. They have hacked American websites, American accounts of private people, of institutions. Then they have given that information to WikiLeaks for the purpose of putting it on the Internet,” Clinton said this week at the third and final presidential debate.
“This has come from the highest levels of the Russian government, clearly from Putin himself, in an effort, as 17 of our intelligence agencies have confirmed, to influence our election,” she added, demanding that Trump condemn “Russian espionage against Americans.”
Trump has seized on the WikiLeaks email dumps to go after Clinton, and maintains that it’s uncertain whether the group is actually colluding with Russia.
“She has no idea whether it is Russia, China or anybody else,” Trump said Wednesday at the debate.
On Friday, Kaine suggested Trump is being intentionally dishonest.
“Now, I’m not going to share anything with you that I can’t share from those [national security] briefings, but what I will say is this, because it has now been made public,” Kaine said Friday.
“The FBI and the director of national intelligence has confirmed that there is absolute, rock-solid evidence that the Russian Government – and this creates a precedent that I’m unaware of in the history of American elections – that the Russian government wants to destabilize, delegitimize and influence the outcome of the American election. Donald Trump has gotten those same briefings,” he added.
The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper Jr., and the Department of Homeland Security said earlier this year in a statement that emails published by WikiLeaks appear to be part of a larger effort to “interfere with the U.S. election process.”
“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” the statement said.
Kaine stuck to this point Friday, and noted that the U.S. intelligence community believes the Kremlin is almost certainly involved in the recent hackings.
“Why is Donald Trump so interested in standing on stage and being Vladimir Putin’s defense lawyer when he won’t even defend the democratic traditions of free elections in this country? There’s something very, very strange about that. Very, very strange about that,” Kaine implied.
He added, “We’re entitled to a president that will put America first, not one that we wonder whether or not he’s got another loyalty. And Donald Trump’s unwillingness to condemn behavior that should be condemned and put it squarely at the feet of Russia is very, very unusual.”
