The Democratic National Committee, in a lawsuit filed Friday, blamed the party’s fundraising woes during the 2016 presidential race on an nefarious plot, engineered by the Trump campaign, Russian officials and WikiLeaks, to disrupt the election.

The Trump campaign countered that lawsuit is a “sham” attempt to makeup for their lackluster fundraising.

Filed in federal court in Manhattan, the lawsuit says the “illegal conspiracy” between the three groups undercut the party’s message and “sowed discord within the Democratic Party at a time when party unity was essential to electoral success.”

“At the same time, Defendants’ conduct resulted in a dramatic drop in donations to the DNC,” the lawsuit says. “The dissemination of hacked information heightened donors’ concerns that confidential information disclosed through their contributions might be publicly disseminated.”

The Trump campaign fired back.

“This is a sham lawsuit about a bogus Russian collusion claim filed by a desperate, dysfunctional, and nearly insolvent Democratic Party,” said Brad Parscale, President Trump’s campaign manager. “With the Democrats’ conspiracy theories against the President’s campaign evaporating as quickly as the failing DNC’s fundraising, they’ve sunk to a new low to raise money, especially among small donors who have abandoned them.”

The Republican National Committee easily outraised the DNC in the 2016 election and has continually outperformed the DNC since.

“The DNC’s move is nothing more than a desperate fundraising stunt from a party unable to acknowledge they lost the election,” said RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel. “This kind of garbage only serves to promote disproven conspiracy theories and fuels exactly what the Russians want — people to question the legitimacy of the most powerful democracy in the world.”

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