Putin hints hackers meddled in election

MOSCOW — Shifting from his previous blanket denials, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that “patriotically minded” private Russian hackers could have been involved in cyberattacks last year to help the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

While Putin continued to deny any state role, his comments to reporters in St. Petersburg were a departure from the Kremlin’s previous position: that Russia had played no role whatsoever in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and that, after Trump’s victory, the country had become the victim of anti-Russia hysteria among crestfallen Democrats.

Raising the possibility of attacks by what he portrayed as free-spirited Russian patriots, Putin said that hackers “are like artists” who choose their targets depending how they feel “when they wake up in the morning.”

“If they are patriotically minded, they start making their contributions — which are right from their point of view — to the fight against those who say bad things about Russia,” he added.

His remarks echoed ones by Trump, who has dismissed accusations of Russian meddling and said that the person responsible for the attack on the Democratic National Committee “could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”

All the same, Putin stuck firmly to earlier denials that Russian state bodies or employees had been involved, an accusation leveled by U.S. intelligence agencies.