US Senator John McCain, an 80-year-old Republican from Arizona, is “not credible” to comment on Russia’s alleged hacking efforts against the United States presidential election, which gave Donald Trump control over the White House, an analyst says.
Keith Preston, the chief editor and director of AttacktheSystem.com, made the remarks in a Saturday interview with Press TV, while commenting on McCain’s statement following a meeting with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko during a visit to the capital Kiev.
The West accuses Moscow of meddling in the crisis in eastern Ukraine and capturing the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, where people voted to join the Russian Federation in a referendum in March 2014.
McCain, who is the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been using the recent escalation with Russia over hacking allegations, as a pretext to attack Moscow.
"We have to make sure that there is a price to pay so that we can perhaps persuade Russians to stop this kind of attacks on our very fundamentals of democracy," he said in Keiv on Friday, calling Russia's hacking and "act of war."
“John McCain is not a credible figure. He is a front man for a political faction in the United States, called the neoconservatives. And these people have a very antagonistic attitude towards Russia… and nations in the Middle East that reject the Washington consensus,” Preston said.
In the run-up to the 2016 vote, WikiLeaks kept releasing batches of emails from the campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton as well as the Democratic National Committee.
Democrats pointed the finger at Russia, an allegation later confirmed by the FBI and the CIA.
According to Preston, “none of this has ever been proven; all of these are simply allegations; the government of the United States has never issued any definitive proof, indicating that Russia was in any way responsible for the things that they (Russians) are being accused of.”
Apart from that, noted the Virginia-based journalist, the US has “interfered in the domestic politics of other nations more times than we can count; I mean the United States has organized coups against the elected governments.”
Moscow has rejected any interference in the US 2016 presidential election through hacking.