If you thought bipartisan criticism of the Republican presidential nominee’s call for Russia to hack his Democratic counterpart Hillary Clinton’s email would stop Trump from praising the Russian strongman, think again.
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Trump, in an interview aired on Fox News on Thursday morning, said his comment about Russian Federation hacking and leaking sensitive government information was not meant to be taken seriously. “I think you probably will be mightily rewarded by the press”.
Trump has frequently voiced admiration for Putin, who has been in power for 17 years as president or prime minister and refuses to grant unconditional support for North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies in the Baltic should they face hostile acts.
By focussing on Clinton’s email drama, Trump drew attention away from the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia where US President Barack Obama was due to speak on Wednesday night and Clinton was expected to accept the party’s presidential nomination on Thursday.
It denied Russia had hacked e-mails of the Democratic National Committee, saying the accusation was motivated by anti-Russian sentiment.
In an article for Bloomberg View, Harvard University law professor Noah Feldman considers whether Trump committed a crime by inciting imminent lawless action.
Before his speech, he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, “This just is beyond my own understanding of the responsibilities that candidates have to be loyal to their country and to their country alone, not to reach out to somebody like Putin and Russian Federation, and try to engage them in an effort to try to, in effect, conduct a conspiracy against another party”. Trump apparently wants it to happen now and Vladimir Putin could take up the challenge. You know, the same supporters who believe she herself wasn’t guilty of espionage or even mishandling classified information.
Updated at 3:50 p.m.to include Bloomberg View article by Noah Feldman.
“What the motives were in terms of the leaks, all that, I can’t say directly”, Obama said. “Don’t tell your grandkids that joke”.
“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”, Clinton’s senior policy advisor Jake Sullivan said.
Asked whether he was concerned that he was urging a foreign nation to hack U.S. political party, he said: “If it’s any foreign country it shows how little respect they have for the United States”. WikiLeaks said on Twitter that it timed its publication of the emails – days before the Democratic convention was starting – “when our verification, research and formatting process was complete and on a day likely to generate interest”.
“To hack another US citizen, regardless if it’s a political candidate or a private citizen, I think that crosses a line”, he said. To get them would require either have to breaking into Clinton’s private server or to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which said it recovered emails that had been deleted.
“America, you have never had a Donald Trump before”, Noah said.
“The American people now have absolute and further proof of the corruption that exists around Hillary Clinton”.
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Trump had also said on July 27 that if elected, he would reconsider US sanctions against Russia for its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and that he would consider recognizing Crimea as Russian territory.
