The Committee to Investigate Russia, a nonprofit that seeks to raise awareness of Russia’s threat to American institutions, launched this week with frequent Trump critic Rob Reiner and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper as two of the splashier names on the advisory board of the committee. They also released a video with Morgan Freeman, who can be seen saying that the U.S. is “at war” with Russian efforts to undermine democracy.
In response, the Kremlin has lashed out at the “emotional” Freeman and said that people should pay him no attention:
“Many creative people fall prey to emotional stress without real information about the real state of things,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on a conference call, according to the Interfax News Agency.
Peskov claimed Freeman’s response was “purely emotional” and should be dismissed as a hysterical outburst.
Russia wasn’t done yet. In a Facebook post, Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, compared Freeman to former Secretary of State Colin Powell claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction — the go-to tactic when someone seeks to discredit investigations into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.
This isn’t the first time that the Kremlin, and Peskov specifically, said that investigating Russia was an “emotional” response and that people would lose interest with it eventually. He previously called it an “obsession.”
“We regret the emotional obsession with the so-called Russian factor that is being zealously maintained in America,” Peskov said in May. “But, on the other hand, we understand that we need to be patient — this obsession will end soon.”
(Via Hollywood Reporter & Raw Story)