White House counselor Kellyanne Conway dismissed the idea that Russia influenced the 2016 presidential election after The Washington Post reported Friday that Russian President Vladimir Putin was directly involved in a cyber campaign to affect the outcome.
“I think it’s very important to show no nexus has been proven between what Russia or any other foreign government tried to do in the actual election result,” Conway told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota Friday on “New Day.” “Really the only person making that case prominently is Hillary Clinton.”
“You’ve got everyone saying that there is no nexus, that not a single vote was changed, and we’re going to stand by that,” Conway added. “We know that Donald Trump won fairly and squarely 306 electoral votes. It had nothing to do with interference.”
The Washington Post’s article said a CIA intelligence assessment determined that Putin was directly involved in the cyber campaign to influence the election to help Trump win. Democratic lawmakers have said the Russians used trolls, hacking and bots to generate fake messages on social media.
Several times during the interview, Camerota asked Conway what the President was planning to do in response to the newspaper’s report.
“This report is new, and we’ll discuss it with him later, but he’s been very clear on the record that he believes in any type of numbers of measures to make sure that democracy flourishes and that voter integrity is intact,” she said. “In fact, he has an entire commission on that.”
Pressed again about what Trump is doing to prevent Russian interference in US elections, Conway said, “President Trump has met with his national security team many times. He started an initiative on voter integrity and used the bully pulpit to express resistance towards any type of outside interference.”
