AP Photo Putin on DNC leak: 'Does it even matter who hacked this data?'

The hacking and release of nearly 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee earlier this year was a public service, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview published Friday.

But the former KGB officer and subsequent director of the country's Federal Security Service sharply denied the notion that the Kremlin was responsible for the hack.


“Listen, does it even matter who hacked this data?’’ Putin told Bloomberg on Thursday. “The important thing is the content that was given to the public.’’

Intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts in the United States see the fingerprints of the Russian government on the DNC server attacks earlier this year, prior to the release of the emails just before the Democratic National Convention that led to the resignation of DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and several other top officials.

“There’s no need to distract the public’s attention from the essence of the problem by raising some minor issues connected with the search for who did it,” Putin said. “But I want to tell you again, I don’t know anything about it, and on a state level Russia has never done this.”

Cybersecurity expert James Lewis remarked to Bloomberg of Putin's denial, "Nice try, but no goal."

Putin also suggested that the DNC's favoritism of Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders should not have qualified as news or a point of surprise in the U.S.

“American society — specifically that the campaign headquarters worked in the interest of one of the candidates, in this case Mrs. Clinton, rather than equally for all of the Democratic party candidates," he said, later remarking that Russian officials did not have enough of an understanding of American politics to successfully compromise the election if they had tried.

“You know how many hackers there are today?” Putin said. “They act so delicately and precisely that they can leave their mark — or even the mark of others — at the necessary time and place, camouflaging their activities as that of other hackers from other territories or countries. It’s an extremely difficult thing to check, if it’s even possible to check. At any rate, we definitely don’t do this at a state level.”

In order to accomplish that, the Russian strongman said, "you need to have a finger on the pulse and get the specifics of the domestic political life of the U.S.,” adding, "I’m not sure that even our Foreign Ministry experts are sensitive enough.”