Summary: The Democratic Party is suing Donald Trump and Russia for interfering in the 2016 presidential election.
The Democratic National Committee sued Donald Trump, Russia, and his campaign for alleging sabotaging the 2016 presidential election.
The civil lawsuit was filed on Friday in Manhattan. According to NBC News, “The DNC is seeking recompense for what it says was millions of dollars in damages from Russia’s hacking of its internal emails, which were then published by WikiLeaks, with the encouragement of then-candidate Trump and his campaign.”
Trump is currently under a criminal investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is looking into whether or not Russia helped Trump win the election.
Friday’s lawsuit is unrelated to Mueller’s probe, but NBC News said that it could force the Trump campaign and Wikileaks to share internal communications about the hack during the discovery process.
Trump told Reuters that he believed the lawsuit was “frivolous.”
“This frivolous lawsuit is a last-ditch effort to substantiate the baseless Russian collusion allegations by a nearly-bankrupt Democratic Party still trying to counter the will of the people in the 2016 presidential election,” Trump said.
DNC Chair Tom Perez said, however, that Russia assaulted American democracy in 2016.
“During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump’s campaign,” Perez said. “This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for president of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency.”
The DNC is represented by the law firm Cohen-Milstein. The lawsuit names Trump, the Russian government, the Trump campaign, and Wikileaks as defendants.
According to the lawsuit, it said that Russia used the Trump campaign because it was a “willing and active partner” in their scheme to hurt American democracy, USA Today stated. The DNC noted that in January 2017 numerous members of the US intelligence community stated that Russia had hacked into American electoral systems and created discourse online by spreading fake news. The DNC added that Russia had also hacked the DNC’s computers for documents and emails and used Wikileaks to spread the stolen information.
“They successfully hacked the Democratic Party in 2016 and they will be back,” Perez said. “We must prevent future attacks on our democracy, and that’s exactly what we’re doing today.”
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