In an interview on CNN Tuesday night, filmmaker Oliver Stone told interviewer Christiane Amanpour that the high-profile hacking attack against the Democratic National Committee earlier this summer was “probably an inside job” and not the work of Russia, as some intelligence services have claimed.
“What do you make of the use of Russia in this election, including Russia being accused and suspected of hacking in to the American political system and potentially subverting the election process in the United States?” Amanpour asked Stone.
“I think it’s a great fiction. It serves a purpose to disguise what’s really going on,” the three-time Oscar-winning director replied. “The intelligence experts that I’ve talked to have indicated to me that it’s probably an inside job.”
“From the Democrats, from someone who’s worked at the Committee, or somebody who knows about…” Stone added when Amanpour pressed him. “I can’t go into all that information. But the point is, haven’t we missed the contents of what’s been revealed?”
In a July interview with CNN, Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said that intelligence sources had informed him that the DNC hack — which led to a trove of embarrassing details about the inner working of the Democratic Party and ultimately forced the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz — was perpetrated by “Russian state actors.”
“What’s disturbing to us is that we — experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these e-mails and other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these e-mails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump,” Mook said. “I don’t think it’s coincidental that these e-mails were released on the eve of our convention here. And that’s disturbing. And I think we need to be concerned about that.”
Stone, who is currently preparing for the release of his upcoming Edward Snowden biopic Snowden, may have access to intelligence experts of his own; in March, the director revealed that he held secret meetings with Snowden inside Russia to prepare for the film.
Stone isn’t the only public figure to cast doubt on the claim that Russian actors were responsible for the DNC hack; in August, Julian Assange, the chief of WikiLeaks — which released the tens of thousands of emails related to the hack in a searchable database — flatly denied Russia’s involvement in the attack.
“There are claims that in the meta data, someone has done a document in a PDF conversion, and that in some cases the language used in the documents is Russian, and therefore the computer that was used for that conversion was Russian,” Assange told Russia Today in an interview. “That is the circumstantial evidence that some Russian, or someone who wanted to make them look like a Russian, was involved, with these other media organizations. That is not the case for the material that we released.”
Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum
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