Russia: Reports of links to Trump campaign are ‘fake’

The Kremlin says there is no truth to reports Donald Trump’s presidential campaign frequently spoke with senior Russian intelligence officials during the 2016 campaign.

“It’s very hard to differentiate real from fake,” Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Russian President Vlaidmir Putin, said Wednesday, according to The Guardian.

“This is absolutely a newspaper report that isn’t based on facts and that doesn’t point to any concrete facts,” he added of The New York Times.

{mosads}Peskov said talks between Trump advisers and Russian officials were ongoing as part of the “normal diplomatic practice.”

“This all has a place,” he said, adding U.S. officials frequently travel in Russia and speak with officials there.

The Times reported Tuesday that intercepted phone calls and phone records show that several aides and allies to Trump’s 2016 run kept recurring contact with senior Russian intelligence officials.

The contacts were reportedly discovered when U.S. intelligence agencies were probing Russia’s hacking into key Democratic groups.

Russia’s hacking initiative was later determined to be aimed at helping Trump win, a conclusion Trump has portrayed as an attempt to delegitimize his victory.

Officials told the Times they had seen no evidence of collusion in regards to hacking or the 2016 race, and it is unclear if any of the discussions focused on Trump himself.

Trump on Wednesday tweeted that the “fake news media” is “going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred.”

“This Russia connection non-sense is merely an attempt to cover-up the many mistakes made in Hillary Clinton’s losing campaign,” he added.