EXCLUSIVE Russian General Denies He's Behind the U.S. Election Plot
Source: The Daily Beast
The former head of the RISS says he never signed off on supposed plans to subvert American democracy. But that doesn’t make him any less a Cold Warrior.
ANNA NEMTSOVA
11.16.17 5:00 AM ET
MOSCOW—The Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISS) is the Kremlin’s think tank. Managed by former officials of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), it draws up guidelines for President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy, and last year it was watching the American elections very closely.
Indeed, according to a Reuters report in April, during the 2016 campaign that took Donald Trump to the White House the RISS produced and distributed around the Russian government two documents: one a framework advising Putin how to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential vote in Trump’s favor, and the other a strategy to discredit the elections if Trump failed.
This week in an exclusive interview The Daily Beast spoke with Lt. Gen. Leonid Reshetnikov, who was in charge of RISS until January 2017—which is to say during the entire period in question last year. He denied the allegations in the Reuters report and gave his own interpretation of what led Russia and the United States to their current state of conflict.
“The American intelligence services are a machine that is always working, constantly making up anti-Russian cases,” Reshetnikov told The Daily Beast.
Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-general-denies-hes-behind-the-us-election-plot
