Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone has said that the claims that Russia had meddled in the 2016 US presidential election were nothing but lies.
For years, Democrats have claimed that the Kremlin had waged a covert campaign to sway the race in favor of President Donald Trump. The 2019 report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller alleged that the Russian government interfered in the election “in sweeping and systematic fashion,” mostly through hacking and messaging on social media. The investigation, however, “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” according to the final report.
A Fox News reporter asked Stone last week whether he thought that Trump was right to “take on” the FBI and the CIA after “what happened to him with the Russia probe.”
“I know. Look at Russiagate; we paid for it,” the filmmaker replied. “I applaud [what Trump is doing].”
“I hate what they did with Russiagate. I really do. I think it’s, again, the lying, the lying, the lying, and selling that to the American people,” Stone said.
“And the whole thing with hating Russia is so negative. It’s so un-American. They are potentially our best partners. As are the Chinese, actually. We have this mentality that they are the enemy. That’s all been inoculated by propaganda,” the director of Platoon and JFK said.
Mueller accused Trump of attempting to obstruct his probe, and a number of former Trump campaign staffers were indicted as a result of the investigation, but not the president himself.
Trump has maintained that the ‘Russiagate’ was part of a politically motivated “witch hunt” aimed at discrediting and undermining his presidency. He dismissed the accusations in the Mueller Report as “fabricated and totally untrue.”
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied having meddled in the US election. In 2016, President Vladimir Putin described the claims about Russian interference as “a mythical, imaginary problem” and a product of “hysteria.”
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