He is running for President of the United States, right?
Donald Trump on Wednesday urged Russian hackers to find the thousands of emails his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton erased from her private server, putting more scrutiny on the “bromance” between the Republican nominee and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Russia, if you are listening,” he told reporters, “I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Russian hackers are believed to have sneaked into the Democratic National Committee’s email system and given thousands of embarrassing missives to WikiLeaks, which dumped the information in order to embarrass Clinton before the convention.
The Russians “probably have her 33,000 emails that she lost and deleted. You’d see some beauties, so we’ll see,” Trump said during a press conference at his Miami hotel.
Clinton handed over 30,000 work-related emails from her private server to the State Department. But another 30,000 were deleted because she claimed they had no relation to her public duties as secretary of state.
Clinton’s campaign slammed Trump.
“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. “That’s not hyperbole, those are just the facts. This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national security issue.”
Another Clinton spokesman, Brian Fallon, told MSNBC that Trump “is now openly inviting Russia to engage in cyberattacks against the United States.”
Trump’s fellow Republicans quickly contradicted him.
“If it is Russia and they are interfering in our elections, I can assure you both parties and the United States government will ensure there are serious consequences,” his running mate Mike Pence said in a statement.
House Speaker Paul Ryan condemned Russia’s meddling, saying: “Russia is a global menace led by a devious thug. Putin should stay out of this election.”
Trump — who last week suggested he would abandon Eastern European NATO allies to Russian aggression — has had a cringeworthy relationship with Putin.
“He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” Trump said in December about Putin.
And the Russian strongman has responded in kind, praising Trump as “the absolute leader of the presidential race.”
On Wednesday, Trump said: “I never met Putin, I don’t know who Putin is” — even though last November, he bragged of knowing him “very well.”
Republicans who at last week’s GOP convention were chanting of Clinton, “Lock her up,” went into spin mode about Trump’s appeal for Russian criminality.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said the two-faced tycoon was just joking. “The media seems more upset by Trump’s joke about Russian hacking than by the fact that Hillary’s personal server was vulnerable to Russia,” he tweeted.
Former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said it was no laughing matter.
“I find those kinds of statements to be totally outrageous because you’ve got now a presidential candidate who is in fact asking the Russians to engage in American politics,” he told Politico. “I just think that’s beyond the pale. That kind of statement only reflects the fact that he truly is not qualified to be President of the United States.”
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the reality television star should be denied intelligence briefings. “How would the CIA and the other intelligence agencies brief this guy? How could they do that?” Reid told The Huffington Post. “I would suggest to the intelligence agencies, if you’re forced to brief this guy, don’t tell him anything, just fake it, because this man is dangerous.”
Security experts agreed. Philip Reiner, a former National Security Council official in the Obama administration, called Trump a “scumbag animal.”
“Hacking email is a criminal activity,” he told Politico. “And he’s asked a foreign government — a murderous, repressive regime — to attack not just one of our citizens but the Democratic presidential candidate? Of course it’s a national security threat.”
But Trump’s comments do not appear to be treason, one legal expert said. “Treason consists only in levying war on the U.S. and its enemies,” said John Harrison, a University of Virginia law professor.
