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16 Jul, 2018 16:10

Putin laughs at suggestion that Russia collected dirt on Trump

Putin laughs at suggestion that Russia collected dirt on Trump

Vladimir Putin laughed after being asked if Russia had compromising information about Donald Trump or his family, replying that it’s absurd to suggest that Moscow collects dirt on every American businessman who visits the country.

Jonathan Lemire, a White House reporter for the Associated Press, asked Putin during the post-summit press conference whether Russia had any “compromising material on president Trump or his family.”

Laughing once the question was fully translated, Putin responded: “When Trump came over to Moscow, I was not aware of it. When he came over as a businessman, I was not even aware that he was in Moscow. Take the St. Petersburg Economic Forum. More than 500 senior executives from the US came over to Russia. Do you think that we are compiling compromising material on all of them? Well, definitely it’s absurd. I cannot really imagine anything more absurd than this. So please, throw out this nonsense.”

Trump added that if there was compromising information about him, it would have been published long ago.

While the Russian leader’s answer was hardly ambiguous, journalists flocked to Twitter to claim that Putin had not denied that Moscow had dirt on Trump.

The theory that Moscow has dirt on the US president stemmed from the so-called ‘Steele Dossier,’ which – among other sensational but ultimately unproven allegations – claims that Trump paid prostitutes to urinate on a bed in which Barack Obama once slept. The dossier, written by retired UK intelligence officer Christopher Steele and allegedly compiled using sources from “inside the Kremlin,” has been repeatedly cited by Russiagate enthusiasts who claim that Donald Trump is a Kremlin puppet.

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