Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta refused two separate times on Sunday to acknowledge that last month’s election was “free and fair.”
“Do you believe this was a free and fair election?” NBC “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd asked Podesta, whose hacked emails were published online during the campaign.
“I think the Russians clearly intervened in the election,” Podesta responded.
He also asserted, citing recent reports, that “the CIA, the director of national intelligence, and the FBI all agree that the Russians intervened to help Trump” and that Russian president Vladimir Putin “was personally involved.”
“You didn’t answer the question,” Todd noted. “Do you believe this was a free and fair election?”
“I think it was distorted by the Russian intervention, let’s put it that way,” Podesta responded.
Asked what he meant by “distorted,” Podesta said: “A foreign adversary directly intervened into our Democratic institution and tried to tilt the election to Donald Trump.”
Podesta’s claims that Russia hacked Democrats specifically to help Trump is still up for debate.
One piece of evidence that goes against that theory is that Russian hackers began attacking the Democratic National Committee’s systems in Sept. 2015. That was well before Trump was considered to have any chance of even winning the GOP primaries, much less the general election.
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