MOSCOW (AP) — President Vladimir Putin says Russia wasn’t involved in the hacking of emails of the U.S. Democratic Party, but thinks the release of the information was a benefit.

Some American officials have claimed that Russian military intelligence was behind the hacking, which provoked a political scandal in the U.S. by revealing apparent prejudice in the Democratic National Committee against Hillary Clinton’s challenger for the presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders.

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“At the state level, we certainly weren’t involved in this,” Putin said in an interview with the Bloomberg news service, according to a transcript released Friday by the Kremlin.

Putin said it wasn’t important who conducted the hacking, but “what’s important is that there was material that was released to the public.”