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Vladimir Putin Denies Hacking DNC, but Thanks Whoever Did

Published on: September 2, 2016 at 3:03 PM
By Anya Felix

The massive hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers earlier this year has been continually linked to the Russian government, but Russian PM Vladimir Putin has come out to reject all those rumors and also to congratulate the hackers.

While Putin denied rumors that he was responsible for the DNC hack, he still thinks that whoever did it was doing a public favor.

In an interview with Bloomberg , the Russian prime minister claimed that the hack of private DNC servers in early August was a great service to the American people , although the Russian government had nothing to do with it at all.

“The important thing is the content that was given to the public.”

Putin seemed to be congratulating the hackers for the transparency that they created by opening private DNC information to the American public and the rest of the civilized world.

Putin also continually stated that it didn’t “matter who hacked this data,” in a slight defense of the hackers, saying that the time and effort spent on finding the hackers was a distraction to the public from the election, according to CNN .

“There’s no need to distract the public’s attention from the essence of the problem by raising some minor issues connected with the search for who did it.”

But when all was said and done, the Russian prime minister denied all accusations that his government had anything to do with the DNC breach.

“I want to tell you again,” he told Bloomberg. “I don’t know anything about it, and on a state level Russia has never done this.”

Vladimir Putin further tried to reject accusations that he had any hand in the US political election by implying that his government was not savvy enough to keep up with American politics, according to CNN .

Putin told reporters, “[to influence the American elections] you need to have a finger on the pulse and get the specifics of domestic political life of the U.S. I’m not sure that even our Foreign Ministry experts are sensitive enough.”

However, no matter how much Mr. Putin denies the accusations that the Russian government is not involved in the DNC hack, his insistence that finding the hackers is just a “distraction” as well as his belief that this leak is actually a good thing for America leads to much suspicion.

Putin’s denials of hacking the DNC are not credible . The Russian government has almost a decade-long track record of state hacking, as reported by Bloomberg.

An internal DNC probe by CrowdStrike Inc., a cyber security company, traced the DNC break-in to two groups it says are linked to Russian intelligence services. One, Cozy Bear, it says is affiliated with the Federal Security Service, the main successor to the KGB, while the other, Fancy Bear, is tied to the Main Intelligence Directorate, a branch of the Defense Ministry.

Additionally, many people find that Putin’s tone of voice during his interview is as incriminating as the evidence from the investigations that all point to Russian sources as the culprits of the DNC hack,

With his praising of the DNC hackers’ work as “for the public good,” Putin’s denials of any involvement with the DNC hack are not being well received.

Watch the full video of Vladimir Putin’s interview with Bloomberg below.

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