President Trump’s long-running embrace of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, has been taken up recently by some of his staunchest Republican supporters, who have publicly sided with Moscow over Ukraine, an American ally, in comments they subsequently disavowed or dismissed as jokes.
During a Sunday interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., was asked whether he shared Trump’s belief that Ukraine, rather than Russia, hacked a computer server belonging to the Democratic National Committee in 2016 to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.
“I don’t know, nor do you,” Kennedy responded.
“The entire intelligence community says it was Russia,” Wallace retorted.
“Right, but it could also be Ukraine,” Kennedy said. “I’m not saying that I know one way or the other.”
Kennedy’s doubts — of the unanimous judgment of U.S. intelligence agencies and the conclusions of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators and the grand jury that indicted Russian operatives for cyber-meddling in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump — came just days after Fiona Hill refuted that view.
“Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country — and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did,” Hill, a former top Russia expert with the National Security Council, said during her opening statement at last week’s impeachment inquiry hearing. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”
On Monday, Kennedy walked back his assertion that Ukraine may have been involved in the DNC hack.
“I was wrong,” he told CNN. “The only evidence I have, and I think it’s overwhelming, is that it was Russia who tried to hack the DNC computer. I’ve seen no indication that Ukraine tried to do it.”
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