Hold on to your pussy hats. The New York Times is reporting that Putin has reversed course and is now admitting that “private” Russian hackers may have intervened in the 2016 presidential election.
MOSCOW — Shifting away from his previous blanket denials of Russian involvement in cyberattacks last year to help the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia denied any state role on Thursday but said that “patriotically minded” private Russian hackers could have been involved.
Who are these patriotic Russians?
Mr. Putin said that hackers “are like artists” who choose their targets depending how they feel “when they wake up in the morning.”
“If they are patriotically minded, they start making their contributions — which are right, from their point of view — to the fight against those who say bad things about Russia,” he added.
What game is Putin playing here? Here’s a possibility: We’ve got the goods on him and it’s time for some major pushback disinformation.
Perhaps worried that American intelligence agencies could release evidence linking last year’s cyberattacks to Russia, Mr. Putin also put forward a theory that modern technology could easily be manipulated to create a false trail back to Russia.
“I can imagine that someone is doing this purposefully — building the chain of attacks so that the territory of Russian Federation appears to be the source of that attack,” Mr. Putin said. “Modern technologies allow to do that kind of thing, it’s rather easy to do.”
HAHAHAHAHA!