The calls by US Democratic senators for sanctions against Russia following reports alleging that the country is meddling in the 2020 presidential election are absurd, the head of the Russian lower house's foreign affairs committee, Leonid Slutsky, said on Tuesday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 25th February, 2020) The calls by US Democratic senators for sanctions against Russia following reports alleging that the country is meddling in the 2020 presidential election are absurd, the head of the Russian lower house's foreign affairs committee, Leonid Slutsky, said on Tuesday.
In a letter published on Monday, US Senators Chuck Schumer and Sherrod Brown were urging the Trump administration to impose new sanctions on Russia, including President Vladimir Putin and other government officials. Schumer and Brown noted that the US Congress had provided the administration with a broad range of sanction tools through the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), a bill signed into law in 2017.
"The new calls by the Democrats to impose sanctions on Russia for interfering in the US elections are nonsensical and absurd. All the accusations are yet again unsubstantiated and unproven. Moreover, representatives of the Democratic Party and mainstream media are trying to attribute so-called 'Russian support' to both the current head of state and the Democrats' favorite, Bernie Sanders, despite reports on the absence of any information from the US intelligence about the impending 'intervention.' Where is the logic?" Slutsky said.
The Russian lawmaker added that the Democrats were once again trying to put US President Donald Trump at a disadvantage or to shift the public's focus from the course of the election campaign in the Democratic Party itself.
The US Congress passed CAATSA in 2017 in response to allegations that Russia attempted to influence the 2016 US presidential election, despite Russia's insistence that it never meddled in any American vote. On January 29, 2018, the United States began imposing sanctions on foreign companies under CAATSA on all major transactions made with the Russian defense or intelligence sectors.
Russian officials have repeatedly said that Russia did not interfere in the US political system and have insisted that the allegations of collusion were made up to excuse the election loss of Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton, as well as to deflect public attention from instances of election fraud and corruption.
