McMaster says the evidence of Russian election interference is now undeniable. Trump denies it.
Following Friday's indictment of 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said Saturday "the evidence is now incontrovertible" that Moscow interfered in the 2016 election. McMaster's statement stands in sharp contrast to President Trump's Friday claim that "results of the election were not impacted" by Russia's "anti-U.S. campaign."
Meanwhile, White House representative Raj Shah mostly echoed Trump on Fox News Friday evening. He argued Russian "efforts were about sowing confusion in the electoral process and undermining the next president, not about supporting one candidate over the other." Mueller's indictment specifically accused its targets of conspiring to "defraud the United States," including by "supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump."
McMaster was speaking at the Munich Security Conference in Germany when he made his remarks. Also there was Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who declined to comment on the indictment. "You can publish anything and we can see those indictments multiplying," Lavrov said. "Until we see the facts everything else is just blabber."
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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