Marco Rubio: Putin used press conference to hurt Trump

Russian President Vladimir Putin used his joint press conference with President Trump to deepen Democratic suspicions about collusion during the 2016 elections, according to a prominent Republican lawmaker.

“There was a very telling moment today,” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a member of the Intelligence Committee, said during an Atlantic Council event.

Putin denied any intervention in the 2016 presidential elections, adding that charges of collusion are “nonsense.” But then he was asked if he wanted “Trump to win the election, and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?” And that produced an affirmative yes.

“Yes, I did. Yes, I did,” Putin replied. “Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.”

Rubio zeroed in on that moment as an “overlooked” example of Putin using the election interference story to hurt Trump.

“Putin made a point of saying, ‘I wanted him to win,’” Rubio said. “He clearly understood how that would be perceived in American politics. He knows that at least 50 percent of the country would hear him say that and say, ‘We told you so, there was collusion,’ and the like. That was not by accident.”

That remark was emblematic of a bipartisan agreement on the panel that assistance for Trump was secondary to driving controversy in the United States.

“They picked one candidate in 2016, but there’s nothing about the Russian efforts that favor one side over the other,” Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence panel, said during the event. “They favor dissension in democracies; they favor undermining our trust in our open electoral systems.”

Both lawmakers emphasized that there are more Russian cyberattacks, election-related and otherwise, on the horizon. “I think we’re seeing the opening shots of what’s going to be an ongoing struggle,” Warner said. “To think that the Russian attempts to penetrate are limited to just our elections infrastructure is wrong; they’re trying to penetrate all of our systems.”

[Related: Trump dismisses Russian election meddling, doesn’t see ‘any reason’ for it]

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