NEWSLINK: Post-interview ‘hot mic’ catches Russia’s Medvedev
[Post-interview ‘hot mic’ catches Russia’s Medvedev – AFP – Dec. 10, 2012 – click here for full article]
AFP covers Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s recent remarks against security services, caught after a televised press conference was supposed to be over, but when at least one live feed was still running (from state-controlled Russia Today):
Stark divisions within Russia’s elite were exposed Monday when a hot mic mishap showed Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev slamming security forces as “jerks” for launching an early morning raid against a filmmaker.
Medvedev on Friday gave an extensive end-of-year interview to five Russian channels in a clear bid to keep up his profile after ceding the Kremlin to his mentor Vladimir Putin earlier this year.
But attention has focused less on the interview itself than on a six minute video of Medvedev’s supposedly off-the-record conversation with the journalists that followed the interview itself and has now emerged on the Internet.
… most notably he … launches a blistering attack on the habits of the Russian security forces.
Medvedev slammed Friday?s pre-dawn raid by investigators on filmmaker Pavel Kostomarov who has been working on an Internet documentary about the Russian opposition called “Srok” (Term).
“Everything is going to be fine, do not worry,” Medvedev tells one of the interviewers, NTV television newscaster Alexei Pivovarov who is one of the co-producers of the documentary.
“They (the investigators) are jerks for showing up at eight in the morning,” he said, using a colloquial insult that literally means “goats”.
“It’s basically just habit? I have many people who work in the security forces and they think that if they come at 7:00 am they will get everything.”
The security services have given a sharply-worded response, albeit with some back-peddling:
The spokesman of the Investigative Committee that carried out the raid then hit back, defending the raid as completely legal and condemning Medvedev’s comments.
“It’s very strange to hear comments that do not just insult Russian investigators but also undermine all the security forces of the country,” said spokesman Vladimir Markin.
That comment was later removed from the Investigative Committee?s website with a source telling RIA Novosti this was due to a formulation “allowing an ambiguous interpretation.”
But Markin told the Kommersant daily Monday that he was not withdrawing his comments.