The Washington Post lead: “Republican nominee Donald Trump pleaded directly Wednesday with the Russian government to meddle in the us presidential election by finding and releasing tens of thousands of private emails from his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton – an extraordinary and perhaps unprecedented maneuver in American politics”.
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“Russia, if you are listening, I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing”.
“Of course I was being sarcastic”, Trump said in an interview with Fox & Friends.
The Kremlin spokesman also rejected Trump’s suggestion for Russian Federation to recover 30,000 emails Clinton deleted from her private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.
Donald Trump said he was using sarcasm when he said Russian Federation should unearth Hillary Clinton’s “missing” emails.
“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 the statement. Obama also appeared to embrace the notion that President Vladimir Putin might have been responsible because of what he described as Trump’s affinity for Putin. “We practically don’t get along with too many”, he insisted.
According to Ashley Parker of the liberal New York Times, Donald Trump “essentially encouraged an adversarial foreign power to cyberspy on a secretary of state’s correspondence”. Now, Trump says he was being “sarcastic” about Russian Federation hacking Clinton’s email, according to The Hill.
While Trump has sided with Putin on a wide range of issues, Putin has not openly backed the Republican nominee.
The Clinton campaign shot back that Mr Trump was posing a possible national security threat while intelligence experts said the comments raised questions about Mr Trump’s judgment.
“I never met Putin”, he said during a press conference at his Miami-area hotel.
Despite Trump’s claim to have been joking, Democrats showed no signs of quieting their scrutiny.
Peskov said comments by Trump that he would consider recognizing Crimea as Russian after Moscow annexed it from Ukraine in 2014 would not change the Kremlin’s neutral stance on the November 8 USA elections.
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“I think his comments were just reflecting on the state of cyber security and the fact that we are hacked all the time“, Alex Holden with Hold Security, LLC said. After decades in the media, Trump’s mastered the art of doublespeak and vague, non-committal answers, and knows how to take advantage of journalistic weak spots, as the Washington Post explored. Trump may want to get his story straight.
