Russia: Met Trump team; didn’t happen, says president-elect’s staff

MOSCOW -- Russian government officials had contacts with members of Donald Trump's campaign team, a senior Russian diplomat said Thursday.

Facing questions about his ties to Russia because of statements interpreted as praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump repeatedly denied having any contact with the Russian government.

After the latest statement by the Russian diplomat, Trump campaign spokesman Hope Hicks denied that there were interactions between Russia and the Trump team before Tuesday's election.

"The campaign had no contact with Russian officials," she said in an email.

"We are not aware of any campaign representatives that were in touch with any foreign entities before yesterday, when Mr. Trump spoke with many world leaders," Hicks said. "Those discussions were congratulatory and forward looking."

[INTERACTIVE TIMELINE: Donald Trump's life, business career, politics]

But Russia's deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, said in an interview with the state-run Interfax news agency that "there were contacts" with the Trump team. "We continue to do this and have been doing this work during the election campaign," he said.

"Obviously, we know most of the people from his entourage," Ryabkov said. "Those people have always been in the limelight in the United States and have occupied high-ranking positions. I cannot say that all of them but quite a few have been staying in touch with Russian representatives."

"We have just begun to consider ways of building dialogue with the future Donald Trump administration and channels we will be using for those purposes," Ryabkov was quoted as saying.

There was also "sporadic" contact with the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's team, though it was "not always productive," he said. Calls to members of Clinton's former campaign team for comment weren't immediately returned.

No further details were given on the claimed contacts, including names in the Trump campaign or other specifics.

Asked later for clarification, a Foreign Ministry official declined to elaborate on Ryabkov's remarks but said standard diplomacy called for "contact with the leaders in the campaign" on matters such as clarifying statements by the candidate or conveying interview requests from Russian journalists.

The ministry official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Later, the Foreign Ministry in Moscow said Ryabkov had been referring to U.S. politicians and supporters of Trump, not members of his campaign staff.

The contacts were carried out through the Russian ambassador in Washington, who reached out to the senators and other political allies to get a better sense of Trump's positions on various issues involving Russia.

In New York, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview that Russian experts had contacts with people in both the Trump and Clinton campaigns. He said such contacts are "quite natural, quite normal."

"And our experts, our specialists on the U.S., on international affairs ... Of course they are constantly speaking to their counterparts here, including those from Mr. Trump's group," Peskov said.

"Of course, it's quite natural that Russian experts are trying to maintain the dialogue with people from different camps. It's very important to understand the main streams, and understand the main tendencies, nuances and the positioning of different parties, different camps here in the United States," he said.

Peskov said Russia has "a very good relationship" with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and relationships with some academics and U.S.-Russia experts involved in foreign policy, which he also called "normal."

Other meetings

It is not uncommon for the presidential nominees of major parties to have contact with foreign leaders, or to meet with foreign government officials.

During the campaign, Trump traveled to Mexico to meet with President Enrique Pena Nieto, and Trump and Hillary Clinton met separately with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in September. Clinton also met Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan and President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt during the U.N. General Assembly session in October; a spokesman for her campaign said there were no communications with Russia.

U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper accused the Russian government last month of deploying hackers to meddle in the U.S. elections. Officials said Russian hackers, possibly with high-level intelligence links, broke into the email account of Clinton's campaign chief, John Podesta. The emails were then disclosed by WikiLeaks in an effort that Clinton supporters claim was intended to damage her White House bid.

Putin throughout the campaign denied that the Kremlin was interfering with the elections.

Speculation has swirled about Trump's links to Russia since early in the campaign, both because of his warm words about Putin and past business ventures in Russia. It is not clear whether Trump currently has any investments in the country, because he has not released any tax records.

But he made millions of dollars by taking the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013. Wealthy Russians also have been an important source of investments in Trump's businesses. His son, Donald Trump Jr., said in 2008 that "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets," adding that "we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."

Several Trump advisers also have had well-publicized ties to Russia, including his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who managed an investment fund for a Russian aluminum magnate with close ties to Putin. He resigned from the campaign days after his name was found in a ledger of payouts from the party of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in a pro-European street revolution in 2014.

Trump's national security adviser, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, sat next to Putin in 2015 during a dinner held by the Kremlin-funded television channel RT, formerly known as Russia Today.

Politically, Trump has called for closer ties with Russia to fight the Islamic State militant group, and he rebuffed calls to renounce Putin after the Russian leader called Trump "colorful and talented," a remark that was mistranslated by some media as "a genius."

"A guy calls me a genius, and I'm going to renounce?" Trump said. "I'm not going to renounce him." Trump has not met Putin, according to statements this year, although in 2015 he claimed he had met the Russian leader.

While Russian officials were openly jubilant about Trump's victory, Ryabkov said Thursday that Moscow "does not cherish any special hopes in the wake of Donald Trump's election as U.S. president."

"We do not feel any euphoria," Ryabkov told Interfax. "We wouldn't like our public, or at least the Interfax subscribers, to have the impression that we are overwhelmed with some rosy anticipation."

Russia is looking forward to a potentially less complicated relationship with the United States going forward, Rybakov added.

"We are not rejecting a single opportunity for dialogue and for cooperation, and will immediately become involved in such work at the moment when our American colleagues will be ready for this," he said.

Peskov, Putin's spokesman, compared Trump's victory speech after the election to a recent speech by Putin.

"It is phenomenal, to what extent, it appears they are close in their conceptual approaches to foreign policy," Peskov told journalists in New York, where he was attending a chess championship. The two leaders' similarities, he said, could help improve relations between Russia and the U.S.

The Russian president had been among the first world leaders to congratulate Trump on his victory.

Information for this article was contributed by David Filipov, Andrew Roth, Tom Hamburger and Brian Murphy of The Washington Post; by Ivan Nechepurenko, Maggie Haberman, Amy Chozick and Neil MacFarquhar of The New York Times; by Ilya Arkhipov, Henry Meyer and Stepan Kravchenko of Bloomberg News; and by Jim Heintz, Matthew Lee, James Ellingworth, Kate de Pury, Jonathan Lemire and Edith M. Lederer of The Associated Press.

A Section on 11/11/2016