“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,”he said at a news conference, referring to messages that were deleted from Hillary Clinton’s private server”.
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Democrats have accused Trump of inviting Russia to meddle in the US election, noting his compliments of Russian leader Vladmir Putin and his disparagement of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, long a bulwark against Russian power. But in an interview that aired Thursday morning, Trump dismissed the controversy. “I think you’ll be rewarded mightily by our press”. And the FBI is investigating who is behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee and the leak of its emails to WikiLeaks – a disclosure that disrupted the first day of the Democrats’ convention and prompted the resignation of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
‘You take a look at what was said on those emails, it’s disgraceful.
Trump’s campaign staff have said he never explicitly invited anyone to hack Clinton, and that his comments were merely an invitation to produce 32,000 emails that she deleted during an investigation into her use of the private server.
“First of all, he didn’t encourage anybody to hack”, Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort told Fox News.
“President Trump would be so much better for U.S.-Russian relations” than a President Clinton, Trump said.
Trump meanwhile said the Russian leader has no respect for Clinton or Obama, hinting that the Russian leader had used America’s most charged racial slur against Obama.
Donald Trump recently called on Russian Federation to release more hacked DNC emails, much to the chagrin of both Washington intelligence experts and ordinary citizens.
“What the motives were in terms of the leaks, all that, I can’t say directly”, Obama said.
Memo to the Republican nominee: Even if you were being sarcastic – a big if – when you’re running for president of the United States, certain things are no joking matter.
Mr Trump also suggested that Mrs Clinton should not receive any security briefings due to the hack that would ensure “that word will get out”.
“What [the DNC] said in those emails is a disgrace and they’re just trying to deflect from that”, he said on “Fox & Friends”.
Trump: No, I didn’t say that.
“It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond”, Trump said in a statement.
Trump’s comments prompted a firm warning from the Clinton campaign, who had already sounded the “alarm” over what they called growing evidence of a foreign power “interfering in an American election”. Oh, and when he says he was just “being sarcastic”, he is showing that he clearly doesn’t understand the severity of such statements. It’s probably not Russian Federation.
Trump’s suggestion that he might abandon NATO’s pledge to automatically defend all member states is also likely to have gone down well in Moscow, where the Western military alliance is cast as an outdated Cold War relic. Many viewed Trump’s language as a coded racial “dog whistle” to some of his supporters.
Q: If the US government decides Russian Federation is responsible, will it go public with that conclusion?
Trump’s invitation was immediately contradicted by his running mate.
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“I would hope that when the administration feels comfortable with the attribution, they would be blamed, they would be shamed, they would potentially be indicted”, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview.
