Trump, breaking with long-standing tradition, has refused to let the public see his official tax records. Now look, you have to understand, Putin – if we could get along with Russian Federation, I think that would be a good thing, not a bad thing.
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But this latest from Trump, by pushing the envelope once again, raises the question of whether other prominent Republicans are ever going to join in.
What Trump did in reality is exactly the same kind of thing.
On Wednesday, Mr Trump told a news conference: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press”, Trump said.
The hackers involved in the DNC breach stole at least one year’s worth of detailed chats and emails and Democratic research on Trump, according to a person knowledgeable of the breach who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
His remarks on Wednesday were regarding 30,000 emails Mrs Clinton did not hand over as part of an inquiry into a private email server.
Trump added in his interview with Fox and Friends that the “real problem is what was said on those e-mails from the Democratic National Committee” leaked to the press last week by WikiLeaks. Since more voters are disenchanted with Trump than with Clinton, when you vote for a minority candidate you are voting against Clinton. He said blaming Russian Federation was deflecting attention from the embarrassing material in the emails. He called for killing terrorists’ families.
Trump then changed the subject to the content of the hacked emails, which he called “disgraceful”. He wasn’t being sarcastic.
It was not immediately clear where or how Clinton’s deleted emails might be recovered, unless an adversary had previously hacked the computer server she operated in the basement of her home in Chappaqua, New York, before she had deleted the messages.
The Kremlin has a response to Donald Trump’s invitation to Russian Federation to “find the 30,000 [Clinton] emails that are missing”. But we must care if a thug like Vladimir Putin is.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, one of the nation’s most powerful Republicans, on Wednesday took Trump to task for his comments.
Trump’s extraordinary comments raised the spectre of whether he was condoning foreign government hacking of US computers and the public release of information stolen from political adversaries – actions that are at least publicly frowned upon across the globe.
Moreover, Moscow views civil protests and popular revolutions such as Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, and Ukraine’s Euromaidan movement in 2013-2014 as US-backed coups aimed at limiting Russian influence in the region.
Donald Trump’s muddled stance on hacking has disturbed security experts at time when the tech industry is looking for clarity on the U.S.’s cyber policy.
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Mr. Trump’s call was an extraordinary moment at a time when Russian Federation is being accused of meddling in the USA presidential election. He was hinting that America might abandon countries that are not on track to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense – a goal most North Atlantic Treaty Organisation countries do not now meet. But there’s something worse going on here. One of the many paradoxes of U.S. policy is that we become involved in the politics of foreign countries in an effort to promote democracy, but we would never tolerate any foreign country attempting to take a similar role (or a much smaller one) in our own politics. He simply does not know what he’s talking about. But for Trump’s supporters, it is his very recklessness and disregard for the conventions of politics that have proved so appealing.
