U.S. media said that intelligence experts believed that the Russian government was behind the hacking of the DNC emails.
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Bob Menendez said Thursday that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s comments about Russian Federation exposing Hillary Clinton’s emails are an “act of treason”.
“To hack another US citizen, regardless if it’s a political candidate or a private citizen, I think that crosses a line”, he said.
“Russia has no respect for our country, if it is Russia”, Trump said at a news conference in Doral, Florida.
A subsequent message from Trump’s allies was less clear, however.
In a statement Wednesday, Pence said “both parties and the United States government will ensure there are serious consequences” to the hacking. But look at all the disgraceful things that Trump – the guy at the very top of the Republican ticket – has been saying right out in public. Meanwhile, other campaign surrogates sent other mixed signals.
Danielle Pletka, a foreign policy and defense expert at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., said the Republican establishment has rightfully been hard on Trump.
But Democrats aren’t buying Trump’s revision of comments he made Wednesday, and his initial statement is nearly certain to be thrust back into the spotlight when Clinton accepts the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday night. “We practically don’t get along with too many”.
To the editor: The Times’ editorial board calmly cautions readers not to hastily link Trump to Russian Federation. “He was making a sarcastic point”, Paul Manafort said Wednesday on Fox News’ The Kelly File. Instead, he dug in.
Furthermore, the Clinton campaign also charged that Russian Federation was trying to help Donald Trump’s campaign by hacking the DNC. “If they have them, they have them”. Only after a national firestorm and a night’s sleep did Trump say he was joking.
This is not because Trump would be a good president – quite the opposite. He added, “Trump was clearly saying that if Russian Federation or others have Clinton’s 33,000 illegally deleted emails, they should share them w/ Federal Bureau of Investigation immed”. “Doubling down? Trump himself doubled down and then walked it back”. “This has to be the first time that a major presidential candidate has actively encouraged a foreign power to conduct espionage against his political opponent”, Sullivan said in the statement, provided to Refinery29.
018-w-37-(Jerry Bodlander, AP correspondent, with Leon Panetta, former defense secretary and Central Intelligence Agency director)-Democrats are incredulous at Donald Trump’s seeming request that Russian Federation get involved in the USA election.
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Later, he dismissed concerns raised by Ms Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook that his comments raised national security concerns. But his comments might have had the opposite effect. While the true culprits “may never be conclusively proven”, there is plenty of evidence suggesting her Republican rival, Donald Trump, “can count on at least some backing from Moscow”, says Julian Borger in The Guardian.
