Washington has again accused Moscow of meddling in the US presidential election after Russian President Vladimir Putin jokingly said that the Kremlin would support Democratic hopeful Kamala Harris in the 2024 race.
The same accusations were made four years ago even though Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said that there was no evidence of foreign interference in the 2020 US election.
Let’s delve into what Western media wrote about the alleged role of Russia, which repeatedly rejected the US’ election interference claims as unsubstantiated, on the eve of that vote.
The New York Times claimed at the time that Russian hackers "infiltrated dozens of state and local computer networks" across the US to allegedly help then-President Donald Trump win the race.
The allegations came as the Washington Post reported that the US government “is mounting a major effort to address Russia’s attempts to manipulate the presidential election” despite Trump questioning intelligence that “the Kremlin is intent on undermining American democracy.”
ABC News, in turn, said that the White House insists that POTUS "was not personally briefed on the intelligence community’s reported findings that Russia is again delivering a misinformation campaign aimed at helping Trump win reelection."
CNN referred to "fresh warnings over Russian hackers targeting the 2020 election, suggesting Moscow is still looking to duplicate its wildly successful 2016 meddling campaign."
The BBC alleged that foreign states, including Russia, could use "covert and overt influence measures" to sway the vote.
This followed the Medium news outlet singling out a classified CIA report, which referred to Russia’s purported "influence operations aimed at denigrating the former US vice president [Joe Biden], supporting the US president [Trump] and fueling public discord" ahead of the November 3, 2020 election.
Four years on, allegations of Russia’s US election interference remain part and parcel of the White House’s political agenda.