During Thursday's edition of the Cable News Network's weeknight Amanpour program, liberal host Christiane Amanpour asked guest Oliver Stone what the well-known film director, screenwriter and producer thought regarding the inclusion of Russia into this year's presidential election.
Stone -- who has generated controversial movies ranging from Midnight Express to the upcoming Snowden “biopic” of the man who released classified documents in 2013 -- called the accusation of Russians hacking into the Democratic National Committee “a great fiction” that disguises “what's really going on.”
Amanpour first asked her guest what he thought of “Donald Trump inviting the Russians to hack into whatever service in the United States to try to find Hillary Clinton's missing emails. You remember when he said that,” she noted.
“What do you make of the use of Russia in this election, including Russia being accused and suspected of hacking into the American political system and potentially subverting the election process in the United States?” Amanpour asked next.
“I think it’s a great fiction,” Stone replied. “It serves a purpose to disguise what’s really going on, The intelligence experts that I’ve talked to have indicated to me that it’s probably an inside job.”
“An inside job from where?” the host inquired.
“From the Democrats, from somebody who’s worked at the Committee or somebody who knows about… ,” Stone replied before Amanpour interrupted: “Democrats hacking themselves?”
“I can’t go into all that information,” the liberal director retorted, “but the point is: Haven’t we missed the contents of what’s been revealed?”
According to an article from Pam Key of the Breitbart.com website in July, Clinton Campaign Manager Robby Mook said intelligence sources had informed him that the DNC hack was perpetuated by “Russian state actors.”
The leak 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.
“What’s disturbing to us is that we -- experts are telling us that 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 helping Donald Trump,” Mook said.
“I don’t think it’s coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention,” he added. “And that’s disturbing. And I think we need to be concerned about that.”
Mook continued:
I think we need to be concerned that we also saw last week at the Republican convention that Trump and his allies made changes to the Republican platform to make it more pro-Russian.
And we saw him talking about how NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) shouldn’t necessarily intervene to defend our Eastern European allies if they are attacked by Russia. If you put all this together, it’s a disturbing picture.
Key also noted that in March, the director held secret meetings with Snowden inside Russia to prepare for the film.
However, Stone isn’t the only public figure to cast doubt on the claim that Russian actors were responsible for the DNC hack.
“In August,” Key stated, “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,” she reported, “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 said during an interview on the Russia Today program: “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.”
As NewsBusters previously reported, Amanpour used her eponymous show on Monday night to angrily maim critics of Hillary Clinton and (a select few) in the media as sexist for raising questions about her health and hiding the pneumonia diagnosis and unwilling to let “a girl have a sick day or two.”
For those familiar with Amanpour’s work and some of the memorable spats attacking everyone from British Conservatives to the Israelis, this rant belongs right alongside them as she began by declaring in this first of many “straw men” arguments: “Imagine a world where you can’t slow down, you can’t rest, and you absolutely cannot get sick.”
And it can't come as a surprise that Stone, who has been at the helm of such liberal films as Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July and Natural Born Killers, would devote his efforts to supporting “whistle-blower” Edward Snowden in a movie set to debut on Friday.
