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Trump aide said Ukraine behind Democratic party hack: documents
WASHINGTON, Nov 3, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Documents released by the US
Department of Justice on Saturday indicated that a top advisor to then-
candidate Donald Trump said as early as the summer of 2016 that Ukraine, not
Russia, was behind a hack of Democratic party emails.
Trump and his surrogates have suggested that Kiev hacked Democratic
National Committee servers and planted evidence to frame Russia, as a way of
undermining the legitimacy of the US leader’s election.
Trump has pressured Ukraine’s president to investigate that debunked
conspiracy theory as well as his election rival Joe Biden — a move at the
crux of an impeachment investigation against him in the House of
Representatives.
The hundreds of pages of documents out Saturday were part of an initial
tranche released to US media outlets Buzzfeed and CNN, which sued the
government for access to notes from the investigation conducted by special
counsel Robert Mueller into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Installments of the internal documents from the Mueller probe, which
concluded in March, will be released every month for the next eight years,
Buzzfeed said.
Campaign chairman Paul Manafort spread the theory among his aides that
Ukraine — not Russia — had hacked the Democratic National Committee, deputy
campaign manager Rick Gates told the FBI, according to a heavily redacted
summary of an interview conducted by the agency.
In July 2016, WikiLeaks began publishing thousands of Democratic National
Committee emails, embarrassing Trump’s election rival Hillary Clinton. US
intelligence later said that the emails were hacked by Russian spies and
handed over to WikiLeaks.
The documents released Saturday also showed how Trump, his top aides and
family members repeatedly discussed how to get the hacked Democratic emails
that WikiLeaks had obtained.
BSS/AFP/MSY/0846 hrs