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WSJ, Washington Post editorials slam Trump for inviting Russian hack

DONALD TRUMP: I was being sarcastic when I said it, but where are those emails?

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Clinton previous year gave the State Department roughly 30,000 work-related emails from the private storage device she used while serving as secretary.

As that convention was under way, Trump urged Russian Federation to find and release several thousand emails that disappeared from Clinton’s private server while she was secretary of state. “I have no relationship with Putin”, Trump said in the interview when asked about the nature of the relationship.

Hillary Clinton said Sunday that Donald Trump’s apparent call for Russian Federation to hack her email shows he is “not temperamentally fit to be president and commander in chief”. “Who knows who it is?”

Unlike Trump’s cryptic answer to Bill O’Reilly about the federal minimum wage where he somehow managed to take three different policy positions in 30 seconds and left us not really knowing what his policy is-or if he’s given it enough thought to actually have a policy-in this case it seems obvious that it was truly a request from Trump for Russian Federation to actively target his opponent for his own political gain. “I think you’ll be rewarded mightily by our press”.

“(Putin’s) not going into Ukraine, okay, just so you understand”, Trump said. It gives me no pause, if they have them, they have them. If you call for them to hack emails (something that they have clearly already done), they probably will do it again.

And, yes, it would be interesting to know whether all the deleted emails were personal business, as Clinton has maintained.

Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed admiration for ruthless dictators such as Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Saddam Hussein, and Vladimir Putin, vicious despots and enemies of our country.

Although some Democrats have wondered aloud whether Trump committed a crime in his remarks directed at Russian Federation, the prospect of any prosecution is considered nil because of the strong guarantee of speech rights in the United States.

Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov tried to arrange a meeting between the former KGB agent and the current Republican nominee, a source close to oligarch Aras Agalarov told the network. “Candidates are advised of the classified nature of the material”.

“This is not a trivial matter when you have a president of the United States, whether he knows it or not, is being helped by Vladimir Putin”, he added.

Trump suggested Democrats are attempting to use his comment to distract voters from the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s emails last week, an incident unrelated to Clinton’s email server scandal.

But the more important issue is whether Russian Federation did, in fact, hack into Democratic Party computers and then help orchestrate the disclosures.

Mark Galeotti, senior research fellow at the Institute of International Relations Prague, said he believed another motive for the hack – if Russia was behind it – would be to portray US democracy as venal and chaotic and so take the sting out of Western accusations that Russian elections are corrupt.

Kiev asked the UN Security Council to issue a statement reaffirming Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in response to the decree, but Russian Federation opposed the move.

“I hear that from my counterparts, my intelligence and security colleagues in many other countries who take very, very seriously and study very, very closely what the political figures in this country say”, Clapper said. The FBI is probing the breach.

While federal authorities have not publicly named Russia as the culprit, three private cyber security firms investigating the DNC hack have fingered two Russian government spy agencies. “It’s so ridiculous. Honestly I wish I had that power. I’m pretty sure that any U.S. government will pay full respect to those decisions”, he told reporters.

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October 2013: Trump says Putin is outsmarting the U.S.

Donal Trump is Hillary Clinton's Republican rival in the race for the White House