Jill Stein: RT-sponsored Dinner With Putin, Flynn, a 'Nonevent'

Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein said Friday that a dinner in Russia, where she was photographed sitting at a table with Russian President Vladimir Putin and former national security adviser Michael Flynn was a "nonevent" coming at the end of a conference about the media and international affairs.

"My campaign paid for the trip, including our airfare, my hotel, or food, all the rest of it," Stein told MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle. "The panel actually took place during the day. As you know, there are and were during the campaign very critical issues, and high on my agenda was a weapons embargo to the Middle East, freezing the bank accounts of those countries who continue to sponsor terrorism, like Saudi Arabia, and nuclear weapons abolition and climate change."

The dinner was sponsored by state-run RT, formerly Russia Today, but Stein said the conference included several other worldwide media outlets, including the Canadian Broadcasting System, the BBC, China TV and more.

"This was a legitimate conference about media and international relations, and my experience at the dinner, you know, the dinner was a nonevent," Stein sais. "Vladimir Putin came in very late to the dinner with his entourage that I assumed were his bodyguards. It turns out they were actually his inner circle. But you never would have known it because nobody was introduced to anybody. No names were exchanged. And there was no translator. So I spent the dinner talking to the German diplomat seated to my right. So it was really, you know, there's no there there in terms of looking at the actual dinner itself."

Last fall, during her presidential campaign, Stein defended RT, claiming that "political dissidents" such as herself are "locked out of our corporate media coverage," and on Friday, she continued to defend RT, despite its link to the Russian government.

"The same could be said about China TV, about TELESUR and about the BBC or the Canadian Broadcasting System," she started, before Ruhle told her she "cannot compare" the BBC and the Canadian network with RT.

"They are state-sponsored and state-associated," she said. "Hillary Clinton herself several years ago said that the programming she watched on RT was valuable and that she watched it when she's out of the country . . . diverse points of view that are often shut out of big American corporate media badly need to be heard."

Meanwhile, Stein insisted this week that "gangster networks and corporations" control the nation's voting software, and she is in court seeking to do a forensic examination of voting machines and software.

"Unbeknownst to most Americans, that technology on which we depend for our elections, it has never actually been examined for evidence," Stein told Ruhl. "American people deserve to know for once and for all has there or has there not been tampering."

Meanwhile, she said she supports the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, but warned about the potential for overreach."

"I'm aware of the potential for overreach and the sensationalizing and the poor media standards, where you get these bombshell stories that turn out not to be true, like the Russians hacked into our energy grid," Stein said. "These are abysmal journalistic standards. There are problems associated with the investigations. The mission of the investigation itself is important and critical and not fully supported. I don't think I'm in the same camp with Donald Trump whatsoever.

She also downplayed reports that Russians placed ads touting her campaign, saying there was just one ad out of some 80,000 pieces of information that was put on line.

"One Facebook ad among 11 trillion pieces of information," she said. "I think that's not exactly credible or compelling."

Meanwhile, during an appearance on CNN "New Day," show host Alisyn Camerota grilled Stein for saying she could not say definitely if Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, as she hadn't seen the evidence to back that claim, and she thinks intelligence agencies are voicing an opinion without facts, reports Raw Story.