Russia says it had contact with Trump team
Story highlights
- Russian officials said they had contact with Trump and Clinton campaigns
- Trump has said he wants to make improved ties with Moscow
Washington (CNN)The
Russian government said Thursday that it maintained contact with
representatives from Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton's presidential
campaigns.
The assertion comes
after Trump was repeatedly accused by the Clinton camp of having overly
close ties to the Russian regime, connections that Trump consistently
denied.
"During
this entire period, we not only sent some signals through some
representatives, or private messages," Russian Foreign Ministry
spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Thursday about the communications with
the Trump staff.
"It was our clear position that we are ready for cooperation and working together and establishing normal relations," she added.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov also said that officials had been in contact with members of Trump's entourage.
"I
cannot say that all of them but quite a few have been staying in touch
with Russian representatives," he told the state-run Interfax news
agency.
Hope Hicks, a spokesperson for Trump's campaign, flatly denied the Russian statements, telling CNN, "This is not accurate."
The Clinton campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
A
spokesman for the US State Department, however, said Thursday that it
was not uncommon for foreign officials to have contact with US political
campaigns.
"There are instances
where other foreign governments ... have contacts with the different
political parties during a campaign," Mark Toner told reporters at the
State Department.
The Russian
assertion comes after Democrats repeatedly accused Trump of being a
puppet of Russian President Vladimir Putin during the course of the
election season.
Former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell, for one, called Trump an "unwitting agent of the Russian Federation."
Morell,
a Clinton backer, said the GOP candidate's positions on a variety of
security issues hewed closely to the Kremlin's ideology.
Trump
has said he wants to make improved ties with Moscow a central goal of
his administration's foreign policy. He repeatedly cast doubt on
Russia's involvement in cyberattacks against the Democratic National
Committee, despite the Director of National Intelligence and Department
of Homeland Security issuing a joint statement saying the Russian
government was to blame.
A Russian
official told CNN Thursday that that the Russian Foreign Ministry had
offered to establish contact with both the Clinton and Trump teams in
the run up to the US election. It's a move which the Ministry says is
normal diplomatic practice "to maintain relations with the two obvious
candidates."
The official said
members of Clinton's team visited Moscow unofficially and held meetings
with high-level representatives from both the Kremlin and the Foreign
Ministry.
No comments:
Post a Comment