Jill Stein On DNC Wikileaks: ‘They Backstabbed Bernie Sanders’

After Jill Stein accepted the Green Party nomination on Saturday, the candidate openly criticized the integrity of the Democratic National Committee — even saying that the organization “backstabbed” Bernie Sanders.

When asked about the DNC leaks that spun the party’s convention into chaos, Jill was dismissive of those fixated on Russia’s suspected involvement, reported Breitbart. Stein argued that Russia meddling with the United States’ affairs was not new information, and that the U.S. was far from an innocent bystander in the cyber-espionage era.

“If in fact this was foul play from Russia, this is what goes on all the time. This is not something new, or surprising. This is the way the game works.”

Jill also echoed what many has been expressed by many Bernie supporters: Russia is being used as a red herring to distract from unsavory practices in Democratic party leadership. More specifically, Stein accused the DNC of trying to “cover up” their bias against Sanders.

“Russia is spying on us, and the DNC, as the DNC was backstabbing Bernie Sanders. All that is reprehensible… The DNC is kind-of accusing Russia of being underhanded and sneaky, in order to cover-up the DNC’s underhanded and sneaky behavior towards the Sanders’ campaign.”

Seizing on disillusioned Bernie supporters, Jill has managed to drum up record third party support. In polls among the solidly Sanders young voter bloc, Stein has even come out ahead of Donald Trump. In a recent McClatchy poll, she landed 16 percent support among respondents under 30 — nearly double that of the Republican candidate.

That can partially be attributed to the way she has refused to pardon the DNC leak, even telling CNN that there was “no question” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was a hero. In an interview with Fox News given late last month, Jill urged voters to scrutinize the content of the e-mails instead of the source. Stein remarked that there was ample evidence of a “misinformation campaign against [Sanders] to bring him down in the polls.”

“Actually look at the emails. I know they’re trying to characterize it something much more trivial… as insults — that they spoke badly of him. But in fact they conducted those campaigns. They worked in collusion with the media, in collusion with the DNC and Hillary’s campaign to give her cover when she had a crisis, and to push forward this idea that his campaign was a ‘mess.’ And that his religion was a problem in the southern states.”

I liked a @YouTube video from @foxnewstoday1 https://t.co/jfZj8uvoEH Jill Stein interview with Fox News : DNC sabotaged Bernie Sanders

— Alain Cornet (@CarlAntoine) August 5, 2016

Jill Stein also seemed unconvinced that Russia was behind the leaks at all. Although several government agencies have suggested that the DNC hack was the work of a Russian state actor, Assange has denied that any of the material Wikileaks released indicated a Russian origin.

“There are claims that in the meta data, someone has done a document in a PDF conversion, and that in some cases the language used in the documents is Russian, and therefore the computer that was used for that conversion was Russian… That is the circumstantial evidence that some Russian, or someone who wanted to make them look like a Russian, was involved, with these other media organizations. That is not the case for the material that we released.”

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[Photo via Drew Angerer/Getty Images]