In comments that appeared to condone the hacking of sensitive US correspondence, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Wednesday said he hoped Russia locates missing e-mails sent by Hillary Clinton when she was US secretary of state.
"Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing," Trump said during a news conference. "I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if that happens. That'll be nice."
Donald Trump on Russia missing Hillary Clinton e-mails (C-SPAN).
At the same event, Trump also said, "I'm not gonna tell Putin what to do. Why should I tell Putin what to do?... It's not even about Russia or China or whoever it is that's doing the hacking. It's about the things they said in those e-mails. They were terrible things." A video of the entire news conference is here.
"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 chief foreign policy advisor, Jake Sullivan, said, according to a New York Times article. "This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national security issue."
Later, Trump posted a tweet that said: "If Russia or any other country or person has Hillary Clinton's 33,000 illegally deleted emails, perhaps they should share them with the FBI!"
Um, haven't we all made variations of this joke since Snowden?
I guess the difference is that we weren't presidential candidates with a history of being unusually comfortable with Vladimir Putin's regime, staring into a dozen cameras when we said it. It's true that Trump's conduct is no worse than your typical internet comments section...but that's an extraordinarily low bar and certainly not what you normally see from a POTUS candidate.
7418 posts | registered 4/10/2012
Dan Goodin Dan is the Security Editor at Ars Technica, which he joined in 2012 after working for The Register, the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, and other publications.
The breach, which security experts and US intelligence officials say was likely conducted by Russian spies,
That's it, jump straight to the #1 Enemy of Hillary/Victoria Nuland/et al. No consideration of the Chi-coms or Israel and the odds that multiple nations were gang-banging Hillary's private server day and night for months, if not years.