Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that anyone involved in circulating claims that his government has potentially compromising information on Donald Trump was “worse than prostitutes.”
“People who order fakes of the type now circulating against the U.S. president-elect, who concoct them and use them in a political battle, are worse than prostitutes because they don’t have any moral boundaries at all,” Putin told reporters at the Kremlin, as quoted by Bloomberg.
Putin was referring to a 35-page packet of unsubstantiated information about Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia compiled by a former British intelligence officer, which Buzzfeed News published a copy of last week. Buzzfeed noted that it could not confirm the many allegations in that dossier, among them that Trump had met with Russian prostitutes while in Moscow.
CNN previously reported that U.S. intelligence officials had presented Trump and President Barack Obama with a two-page summary of that dossier, stating that Russians had potentially compromising information about the President-elect.
Putin said it was “complete nonsense” to believe that Russian security services “chase after every American billionaire.”
Trump was “a grown man, and secondly he’s someone who has been involved with beauty contests for many years and has met the most beautiful women in the world,” Putin said, as quoted by Bloomberg. “I find it hard to believe that he rushed to some hotel to meet girls of loose morals, although ours are undoubtedly the best in the world.”
In a press conference Wednesday, Trump dismissed the claims made in the dossier.
“Does anybody really believe that story?” he asked. “I’m also very much of a germaphobe, by the way. Believe me.”
