Earlier today, Donald Trump touched off another political firestorm when he directly addressed the Russian government during a press conference – stating that he hopes Moscow’s SVR managed to hack Hillary Clinton’s unsecure email server, and musing that they’d be “rewarded mightily” for revealing its contents.
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“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing”, Trump said.
At a sweeping news conference, the NY billionaire tried to undermine his White House rival, astonishingly implied that Vladimir Putin used a racial slur against President Barack Obama and promised a heyday of US-Russian relations under a Trump presidency.
“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”, senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement.
Trump was referring to emails on Clinton’s private email server that she deleted because she said they were private before she turned other messages over to the State Department.
“No presidential candidate who’s running to be president of the United States ought to be asking a foreign country, particularly Russian Federation, to engage in hacking or intelligence efforts to try to determine what the Democratic candidate may or may not be doing”, said Panetta, a Clinton ally. “Now, if Russian Federation or China or any other country has those e-mails, I mean, to be honest with you, I’d love to see them”. “They probably have her 33,000 emails that she lost and deleted because you’d see some beauties there”, he said.
Instead, Miller said, Trump was pushing anyone who has them to give them over to authorities, a sentiment Trump himself echoed in a tweet minutes after he left the stage.
Trump, whom Democrats have accused of having cosy ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, repeatedly declined to condemn the actions of Russia or any other foreign power of trying to intervene in the a U.S. election. Low voter turnout, the president said, may benefit the bombastic NY businessman, in similar ways that suppressed turnout among British youth contributed to the success of a campaign to pull the United Kingdom out of the European Union last month.
Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, said: “With so many unanswered questions about Trump’s ties to the Kremlin, it’s imperative that Trump immediately release his tax returns and disclose his financial ties to Russian Federation”.
They came as the Democrats met on the third day of their national convention in Philadelphia, where Clinton will accept the presidential nomination Thursday night to face Republican Trump in November.
In a press conference in Florida, Trump said he would love to see a woman become president – just so long as Clinton is not that woman.
Asked if he would recognize Crimea as Russian territory, Trump said he would be “looking into that”.
Trump meanwhile said the Russian leader has no respect for Clinton or Obama.
“Why are they giving her briefings?”
“What the motives were in terms of the leaks, all that, I can’t say directly”, Obama said.
As everyone now knows, the almost 20,000 e-mails so far released contain revelations about how the party – which was publicly claiming to be neutral in the primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders – was actively trying to torpedo Sanders’ bid.
And that seems perfectly OK with Trump.
“You know, I’ve run out of words to express my shock in how, uh, completely beyond the pale that Donald Trump is as a potential leader of the Free World, the commander-in-chief of our country”.
He also took the opportunity to call the current Democratic leadership weak, noting that if Russias were involved, the hack shows that they don’t respect the US government.
Moscow “probably isn’t” behind the Democratic National Committee email hack, said Trump, who is yet to receive his first government intelligence briefing.
If Trump’s statements were legally confirmed to be treason – which would need to happen via a trial conviction – Trump would be ruled out of holding the office of president, or any federal government position.
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Trump’s comments were not the first time he urged hackers to release information to damage a political opponent.
