WASHINGTON, February 25. /TASS/. US Senate Democratic leaders demanded that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin imposed sanctions on Russia and its President Vladimir Putin for alleged attempts to interfere elections in the United States, the Axios news portal said.
The letter, signed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (New York), Senate Foreign Relations Ranking Member Bob Menendez (New Jersey) and Senator Sherrod Brown [Ohio], calls on Pompeo and Mnuchin "to identify and target for sanctions all those determined to be responsible for ongoing elections interference, including President Putin."
In their opinion, doing anything less would be an abdication of "responsibility to protect and defend the US from this serious threat to our national security, and to the integrity of our electoral process."
The New York Times said earlier that "intelligence officials warned House lawmakers last week that Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign to try to get President Trump re-elected, five people familiar with the matter said, a disclosure to Congress that angered Mr. Trump, who complained that Democrats would use it against him."
According to Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin expects that as the US presidential election approaches, there will be an increasing number of reports about Russia’s alleged attempts to interfere in the vote. "This is another in a series of paranoid reports, and we regret to say that their number will grow as the election approaches. They certainly have nothing to do with the truth," he told reporters, commenting on the New York Times article.
American intelligence agencies continuously hurl accusations at Russia of meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. In May 2017, the US Department of Justice announced that former FBI Chief Robert Mueller had been appointed as special counsel to investigate alleged Russian interference in the 2016 American election. In the end, Mueller came up empty-handed, admitting that there was no evidence that US President Donald Trump had colluded with the Russian government to win the election. Trump and key members of his team have repeatedly rejected all the accusations concerning any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Moscow has also refuted these allegations.