Hillary Clinton's campaign manager Robby Mook visits workers at a campaign office on Feb. 19, 2016, in Las Vegas. | Getty Mook suggests Russians leaked DNC emails to help Trump

Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook suggested Sunday that internal DNC emails leaked last week were an effort from the Russians to help Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

“What’s disturbing to us is that experts are telling us Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually of helping Donald Trump,” Mook said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”


“I don’t think it’s coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention.”

Mook did not provide evidence that the Russians were trying to help Trump when pressed by CNN’s Jake Tapper to back up his charges, instead falling back on what “experts” were saying.

“This isn’t my assertion — there are a number of experts that are asserting this,” Mook said. “I think we need to get to the bottom of these facts. But that’s what experts are telling us. Experts are telling us it is, in fact, the Russians who hacked these emails.”

Last month, it was publicly revealed that Russian government hackers had broken into the Democratic National Committee computer servers, which contained opposition research on Trump. The DNC emails released by WikiLeaks on Friday showed DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other DNC staffers being critical of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

The Clinton campaign and Democrats have gone after Trump for his praise of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, a line of criticism that was amplified this past week when Trump suggested he might not honor NATO’s commitments to defend Eastern European allies attacked by Russia, if they didn’t make sufficient financial contributions to the alliance.

Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort dismissed Mook’s comments on Sunday, telling ABC’s “This Week” that it was “pure obfuscation on the part of the Clinton campaign.”

“What they don’t want to talk about is what’s in those emails,” Manafort said.

Later, Trump's campaign issued an official response.

"What a joke. This shows that Hillary Clinton will do and say anything to win the election and hold onto power in the rigged system," said Jason Miller, the campaign's senior communications adviser.

