MOSCOW — The Kremlin on Wednesday dismissed as “a total fake” allegations that Russian intelligence agencies collected compromising information about President-elect Donald Trump — a denial that was echoed by much of Russia’s establishment.
But when President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman went further — saying the Kremlin “does not engage in compromising material” — it was widely greeted by the rolling of Russian eyes.
Gathering “kompromat,” the Russian word for potentially embarrassing information that can offer leverage, has a long history reaching back to Soviet days.
It was raised to a high standard by the KGB, the predecessor of Russia’s Federal Security Service and the agency where Putin and many of his closest allies started their careers. One sex tape toppled a prosecutor general on an anti-corruption crusade. Others have targeted opposition politicians.
And Russia, said one Federal Security Service colonel, has not lost its taste for kompromat despite the flat-out denial by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
“Without a doubt we gather kompromat. … In the Kremlin, there’s piles of it, as there are in all the security agencies,” said Gennady Gudkov, also a former legislator who was forced out of parliament for his opposition to Putin. “As a rule, the special services collect information on everyone, like a vacuum, picking up anything and everything.”
This in itself does not confirm the allegations, summarized in a classified report U.S. officials said was delivered to President Barack Obama and Trump last week, that Russian intelligence services have compromising material and information on Trump’s personal life and finances.
But the deep roots of kompromat add another layer to the probes into the credibility of the reports about a Trump dossier.
Trump himself rejected the allegations, first in tweets and then during a news conference in New York.
Russia’s strong denials are directly at odds with the report and were reminiscent of previous Kremlin rebuttals after U.S. intelligence agencies said Russia had a hand in hacking web accounts of the Democratic Party and top campaign figures for Hillary Clinton. Russia, however, has made no attempt to hide its support for Trump, whom many Russian leaders see as less adversarial than Clinton.
At the news conference, Trump acknowledged for the first time that he thinks Russia was responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee.
