Republican senator John Kennedy backtracks after repeating Trump's debunked Ukraine conspiracy theory
'I was wrong', says pro-Trump senator
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Your support makes all the difference.A Republican senator who claimed that Russia may not have meddled in the 2016 US election has admitted that he is wrong, just days after peddling the conspiracy that Ukraine was the true culprit.
Senator John Kennedy, of Louisiana, backtracked on the statement during an appearance on CNN Monday night.
Just a day earlier, he had suggested that Ukraine may have meddled in the election instead of Russia – in spite of a consensus among US intelligence implicating the Kremlin.
“I don’t know, nor do you, nor does anybody else,” Mr Kennedy said on Sunday, on Fox News, spreading a conspiracy theory that has been used by Republicans to explain Donald Trump’s apparent efforts to force the Ukrainian government to investigate the election.
When pressed about the US consensus about Russia having conducted the meddling, including public testimony from Fiona Hill last week, he responded: “Right, but it could also be Ukraine.”
But in a remarkable pivot rarely seen in modern US politics, the first-term senator has now said he was wrong, and that the conspiracy used to defend Donald Trump was not based on available evidence..
“I was wrong, the only evidence I have – and I think it is overwhelming – is that it is Russia that tried to hack the DNC computer,” Mr Kennedy told Chris Cuomo, referring to the acronym for the Democratic National Committee and the hackings of their servers during the 2016 campaign.
The flip-flop comes as Republicans have been forced to defend Mr Trump against an impeachment inquiry over his efforts to coerce Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce publicly that his government had begun an investigation into Joe Biden and the 2016 election.
In order to ensure that announcement was made, Mr Trump’s administration withheld Congressionally approved military aide to Ukraine, leading to considerable concern among Democrats that he had misused the power of the office of the presidency to pursue personal matters.
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