Russia and Putin · 2016 campaign · № 14
Invited Russia to find Clinton's missing emails: 'Russia, if you're listening'
“Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
- Said
- , News conference at Trump National Doral, Miami
- Subject
- Clinton's emails
- Type
- Intelligence and security
- Topic
- Elections
- Era
- 2016 campaign
What happened
Asked whether he would tell Putin to stay out of the election after the release of hacked Democratic National Committee emails, Trump said 'Why do I have to get involved with Putin? I have nothing to do with Putin' and that if Russia was responsible, 'which it's probably not, nobody knows who it is', it showed 'how little respect they have for our country'. According to the special counsel's report, 'within approximately five hours of Trump's statement' Russian GRU officers targeted for the first time email accounts at Hillary Clinton's personal office. In written answers to the special counsel in November 2018 Trump said he made the statement 'in jest and sarcastically, as was apparent to any objective observer'. The report said the investigation 'did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities'. Two days earlier he had tweeted: 'The new joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC e-mails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me'.