Biden rejects claims of compromising material on Trump
Outgoing US Vice President Joe Biden has rejected the claims of "kompromat" -- compromising material intended to be used against someone -- on President-elect Donald Trump as “unsubstantiated”.
But, speaking to reporters in the White House on Thursday, Biden condemned the US president-elect for disparaging the country’s intelligence community, saying Trump’s statements casting doubt on US intelligence “play into the Russian narrative” of a beleaguered America.
On Tuesday, BuzzFeed published a 35-page document containing unverified information from an alleged former British operative who claimed that Trump was caught in a compromising position in Russia.
The document also claimed that Russia is in possession of "compromising" personal and financial information about Trump which it is using to blackmail the US president-elect.
Trump on Wednesday accused US spy agencies of using Nazi tactics over leaking “fake news" and "phony stuff” about him to the media. He said the published material about him is part of a “political witch hunt” campaign against him, and added that the leaks from the intelligence community were reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
Biden said that top intelligence officials briefed him and President Barack Obama on the claims, but he described them “totally ancillary” and “had nothing to do with what the president asked for.”
Biden said he had read the entire document that includes the claims, and he and Obama largely dismissed the unverified information themselves.
“The president was like, ‘What does this have to do with anything?’” Biden said, adding that the White House did not ask the intelligence agencies to check the claims. “Neither of us asked for any detail.”
Biden, however, blasted Trump’s comparison of the US intelligence agencies with that of Nazi Germany’s agencies.
“The one thing you never want to invoke is Nazi Germany, no matter what the circumstance is, even if you’re trying to make a point that may—and I’m not suggesting it did—that may be relevant,” Biden
Russia on Wednesday rejected the BuzzFeed document as “completely fake,” adding that Moscow does not possess any blackmail file on Trump containing footage of him in a “compromising” position in a Moscow hotel.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's chief spokesman and aide, Dmitry Peskov, said the BuzzFeed report is a "complete fabrication and utter nonsense."
"This information does not correspond to reality and is no more than fiction," he said, adding that the Kremlin "does not engage in collecting compromising material."
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