Vladimir Putin says that Moscow knew from the start that special counsel Robert Mueller wouldn’t find any connections between Russia and the 2016 presidential election — echoing President Trump’s own verdict on the probe.
“That it [Mueller’s inquiry] would finish in that way — like a mountain giving birth to a mouse as they say — was clear to us in advance. I’ve been telling you this all along,” said the Russian president, speaking Friday in St Petersburg.
“We said from the start that this infamous commission of Mr. Mueller’s would not find anything because nobody knows this better than us. Russia did not meddle in any elections in the United States. There was no collusion, as Mr. Mueller said, between Trump and Russia.”
Attorney General William Barr said in a summary released last month that Mueller had found no evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia in the election.
Putin said the original allegations of collusion were “complete nonsense” that had been invented for domestic US political consumption and as part of what he described as America’s internal political struggle.
Barr told lawmakers on Tuesday that he intends to release the Mueller report to the public within a week.
While the Mueller report cleared Trump of colluding with Russia, it did not clear Moscow of trying to meddle in the 2016 vote.
US intelligence agencies have unanimously concluded that Russia did interfere, with a campaign of email hacking and online propaganda aimed at sowing discord.
The president has repeatedly ripped the Russia probe as a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” and cited Muller’s report as proof.
But the contents of the full, nearly 400-page report remain a mystery.
When asked at the same event whether he wanted to see Trump re-elected next year, Putin declined to express a view, citing a long list of disagreements with the Trump administration and saying that the question of Trump’s possible re-election was purely a matter for the American people.
But Putin, who has praised Trump in the past, said he hoped Moscow and Washington would be able to work together to try to resolve their many differences on the international stage once what he described as the US political crisis was over.
With Reuters