Trump shrugs off claims on Russia links
‘Fake news – a total political witch-hunt’
US president-elect Donald Trump yesterday faced explosive claims that Russian intelligence gathered compromising information on him, which the Kremlin dismissed as fake and aimed at damaging ties.
Trump denounced a report circulating in US media with damaging claims over his personal and professional life as he was set to hold his first news conference in nearly six months.
“FAKE NEWS – A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH-HUNT!”, he tweeted on Tuesday after CNN reported that intelligence officials had briefed him on the claims last week.
Russia denied the claims, with President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, telling journalists: “The Kremlin does not have compromising information on Trump.”
The Kremlin spokesman called the dossier a total fake and “an obvious attempt to harm our bilateral relations”.
Last week, intelligence chiefs presented America’s incoming 45th president, as well as current President Barack Obama, with a two-page synopsis on the potential embarrassment, according to CNN and the New York Times, who cited multiple unnamed US officials with direct knowledge of the meeting.
Obama had little to add publicly to the bombshell revelations, saying he had not yet seen the media reports, as he delivered his farewell address on Tuesday with 10 days to go until Trump’s inauguration.
He said, however, he hoped Congress and the Trump administration would continue to work toward finding answers about who was responsible for hacking scandals that have roiled American politics in recent months.
CNN gave no details of the allegations, but US media outlet Buzzfeed published, without corroborating its contents, a 35-page dossier of memos on which the synopsis is based, which had been circulating in Washington for months.
The memos describe sex videos involving prostitutes filmed during a 2013 visit by Trump to a luxury Moscow hotel, supposedly as a potential means for blackmail.
They also suggest Russian officials proposed lucrative deals in order to win influence over the Republican real estate magnate.
The dossier was originally compiled by a former British MI-6 intelligence operative hired by other US presidential contenders to do political “opposition research” on Trump in the middle of last year, according to CNN.
Trump was reportedly informed of the existence of the dossier – and its salacious details – last Friday when he received a briefing from US intelligence chiefs on alleged Russian interference in the presidential election.
The classified two-page synopsis included allegations that there was a regular flow of information during the campaign between Trump surrogates and Russian government intermediaries, which a Trump aide denied.
The 70-year-old billionaire directly assailed Buzzfeed, retweeting an article that blasted the online publication for publishing the “unverifiable” dossier.
Buzzfeed said it had posted the material in the interest of transparency, but its editor in chief, Ben Smith, acknowledged that “there is serious reason to doubt the allegations”.
Democrats were left stunned by the developments, with House Democrat Jared Polis tweeting that if the reports are true, “he should not be president”.
The FBI was provided with the information in August, more than two months before the November 8 election.