At this week’s G-20 summit in Germany, one subject the world’s most powerful leaders are discussing is why Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman did not cooperate with U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials as they investigated cyberattacks against the Democratic National Committee, President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter Friday morning.
“Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!” Trump wrote on Twitter Friday morning. He did not explain why Podesta, who did not work for the DNC, would have been responsible for its email server.
Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the DNC, noted that discrepancy in a post to Twitter, linking to Trump’s post and writing that “1) Podesta never ran the DNC. 2) DNC worked with FBI to kick out Russians. Worked with DHS. 3) Putin make you tweet this before mtg?”
Amid the months-long swirl of reporting surrounding Russia’s efforts to interfere in last year’s presidential election, as well as allegations that Trump associates may have colluded with Russia in those efforts, the president has sought to cast blame on the DNC, former President Barack Obama and others for not doing enough to stop the hacking.
And while he has eagerly accused Obama, the DNC and Podesta of negligence or worse, the president has stopped short of outright blaming Russia for launching the campaign of cyberattacks. Instead, he has said only that he thinks Russia was involved, but that other nations and individuals could have been involved as well.
Trump said Thursday at a press conference that “nobody really knows for sure” if Russia was behind the campaign of cyberattacks, even though the intelligence community he leads as president has expressed certainty that the Kremlin is to blame.
The president is scheduled to meet Friday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the pair’s first face-to-face meeting since Trump’s election. The White House has not said whether or not Trump plans to bring up Russia’s campaign of election-year cyberattacks.
[Politico]
Reality
At this week’s G-20 summit, Donald Trump again attacked an American while on foreign soil.
Two issues here:
- Podesta worked for the Clinton campaign and did not work for the DNC, so he would not have been responsible for its email server.
- Reporting about the DNC hack shows the FBI never asked for the servers. (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html)
