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US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced at a press conference the indictment of the 12 Russian agents in Washington on July 13, 2018. REUTERS / Leah Millis
The US Department of Justice announced on Friday, July 13 the charge of twelve Russian agents for espionage. They are accused of hacking the computers of the Democratic Party during the 2016 presidential campaign.
With our correspondent in San Francisco, Eric de Salve
The twelve officials charged with conspiracy against the United States are all members of the GRU, the intelligence service of the Russian army.
Prosecutor Robert Mueller, charged with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 US campaign for the benefit of candidate Trump, accuses them of hacking Democratic Party computers to retrieve sensitive documents.
Through a fake website, the 12 spies would then have organized the dissemination of these documents to influence the election to " an organization " that the US Department of Justice did not name. In all likelihood, this would be the WikiLeaks site that had released in 2016 thousands of compromised hacked Democratic emails for Hillary Clinton.
Even if the number two of the Ministry of Justice denies any link with the calendar, this announcement comes three days before the meeting scheduled in Helsinki between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump now under pressure. From London, the US president has promised to pose " firmly " the issue of interference to his Russian counterpart.
For his part, the Leader of the Democratic Opposition in the Senate Chuck Schumer immediately called for the cancellation of this meeting and this " until Russia takes visible and transparent measures to prove that it will not try new interferences in the upcoming US elections. But the White House has swept the demand. The summit " will take place, " said Sarah Sanders, spokeswoman for the US executive.