‘It’s fake news’: Russian IT expert responds to unverified report alleging ties to Trump & Kremlin
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RT.com
Tech expert Aleksey Gubarev, who alongside his IT company, has been listed in a report alleging close ties between Donald Trump and Russia, told RT that he was never contacted by any intelligence service on the matter and that the report is “fake news.”
Text of the report alleging cooperation between Donald Trump’s camp and Russian hackers, and also claiming that Moscow has been blackmailing the US president-elect for past sex adventures, was published on Buzzfeed website Tuesday. However, the allegations, reportedly compiled by a former UK intelligence agent Christopher Steel are unverified and also contain mistakes (like misspelling Russia’s Alfa Bank as ‘Alpha’ Bank).
Among others, the paper in question included Gubarev’s name and his global tech Holding XBT, which also runs a Dallas operated company Webzilla. It is alleged in the report that XBT was linked to the recent hacking scandal with the US Democratic Party and a following leak of the emails from its institutions and members.
“We were shocked to find our names there,” Gubarev told RT, saying he had “never met” anyone listed in the report. “Nobody from the intelligence agency contacted me about this story… to verify this information,” he said. Neither did any journalists reach out to him, Gubarev said.
The published report is “fake news,” Gubarev said. “I still do not understand why our names [are] there and we do not understand a reason of this report in general,” he told RT.
The IT expert also noted that he is not “living in Russia for already 15 years.” Yet, the XBT chief said he and his company “are open for any investigation” and that they have “nothing to hide.”
Following the publication of the report on Buzzfeed, its author has been apparently identified, turning out to be a British ex-intelligence member, Christopher Steele. He is one of two directors at Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd, a private security-and-investigations company.
Gubarev told RT he will now take legal action against Steele over false claims. “We are 100 percent filing a lawsuit against Christopher Steele who created this report and his company in the United Kingdom. We are already working on that.” The XBT chief said that a “competitor” might be behind the allegations against his company, while “another option” would be his professional activity.
“Recently I was giving some comments to Bloomberg,” Gubarev said in the interview with RT. The IT expert stated to Bloomberg that there was “no connection between Donald Trump servers and Alfa Bank servers.”
“It was a technical analysis from our site which we sent to Bloomberg.” It was reported in November that a server owned by Alfa Bank (listed in paper published on Buzzfeed), allegedly had communications with a server hosting the Trump Organization domain address. Yet there has been no serious evidence backing the claim.
During a press conference on Wednesday, Donald Trump called BuzzFeed a “failing pile of garbage” and also refused to answer a question by a CNN reporter (the outlet also published parts of the report). The information in the report was in fact “false and fake and never happened,” Trump said.