“I think you’ll be rewarded mightily by our press!” He was referring to emails on Clinton’s private server that she said she deleted – because they were private – before turning other messages over to the State Department.
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Miller, the Trump campaign spokesman, said on Twitter that Trump was not encouraging Russian Federation to hack into Clinton’s emails but rather was urging anyone who had her emails to hand them to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. While the motive for intrusion and release of emails isn’t known, many Democrats have speculated that it’s a possible attempt to influence the outcome of this year’s presidential election.
But Republican officials and pundits living outside the Trump campaign and the legislative chambers were far less muted in their opprobrium.
But Trump said that he was disappointed that Bill Clinton’s lengthy telling of their life story had left out a portion – presumably his sex scandals.
“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 spokesman Jake Sullivan said in a statement. “That’s not hyperbole, those are just the facts”.
Trump has alarmed European allies and many us national security experts with talk of forcing North Atlantic Treaty Organisation nations to pay more for the USA security umbrella.
Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, released a statement soon after that seemed to attempt to steer the campaign back upon saner streets: “The FBI will get to the bottom of who is behind the hacking [of the DNC’s emails]”.
The content of the now infamous DNC emails in this political season has overshadowed the real, more unsafe issue – that Russian Federation was the source of the leaks on the eve of the party’s convention.
“If it is Russian Federation, and they are interfering in our elections, I can assure you both parties and the United States government will ensure there are serious consequences”, Pence said in a statement.
The House intelligence committee’s senior Democrat, California Rep. Adam Schiff, charged that Trump’s comments showed “staggeringly poor judgment”.
Former CIA Director Leon Panetta said on CNN on Wednesday that Trump’s comments were “beyond the pale” and showed that he was not qualified to be president.
His campaign chair’s close ties with pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine has also raised allegations that Trump is too cozy with Moscow and its powerful leader Vladimir Putin.
Democrats attending the convention in Philadelphia said Trump has business interests with the Russians, another reason they are demanding he release his tax returns.
“I’m not going to tell Putin what to do – why should I tell Putin what to do?” “Why should I tell Putin what to do?”
“There’s no change”, Trump said.
Incredibly, encouraging foreign espionage perpetuated against the United States weren’t the only words sent from Trump to Russian Federation, with love.
“I’ve seen all kinds of insane stuff happen”, Obama said. “When politicking I think everything needs to be taken with a grain of salt”. In 2014, continuing to push the “birther” conspiracy theory Trump began against President Barack Obama in 2011, he asked “hackers” to access the president’s college records.
Trump also claimed during his news conference that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s lack of respect for the USA prompted him to once use the “N word”, implying that he was referring to President Barack Obama.
When asked by NBC News if it gave him pause that he was welcoming foreign, non-allied countries, Trump said that “it gives me no pause” because “if they have them, they have them”.
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Whether or not the comment was made in jest – a possibility given Trump’s miserable attempts at humour and something resembling a smirk visible in video of the moment – it’s doesn’t quite hit the mark, given that he’s now expressly encouraged a powerful country with an eccentric leader to hack into the email of a United States presidential candidate.
