WEB DESK
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday denied that Russia directly influenced this year’s US election. Speaking at his annual end-of-year press conference with Russian and international journalists in Moscow, Putin said the Democratic Party was wrongly trying to blame its defeat to Republican Donald Trump on “external factors.”
He has also called Donald Trump’s nuclear comments “normal.” In October, website WikiLeaks published some 60,000 emails hacked from the Democratic National Convention. In the run-up to the election, the email hack dominated the news cycle.
American intelligence agencies have since found that the Kremlin was directly involved in the hack, allegations that Putin has adamantly denied.
“Losers always look for ways to accuse someone else,” Putin said on Friday, accusing US Democrats of using Russia as a scapegoat for their defeat.
“They (the Democrats) are losing on all fronts and looking elsewhere for things to blame,” Putin said. “In my view this degrades their own dignity. You have to know how to lose with dignity.”
The President then emphasized that it was more important to scrutinize what was exposed in the leak, rather than who was behind it. Putin said the emails showed how the Democratic Party was manipulating public opinion in favor of Hilary Clinton and at the expense of Bernie Sanders, her rival in the primaries.