His call for Moscow to find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails won him attention, but his foreign policy found few supporters on either side of the aisle.
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The nominee of the Republican Party — the party that takes credit for winning the Cold War — on Wednesday appeared to align himself with Russia over his Democratic opponent, in remarks that suggested to many he was urging Moscow to interfere in a U.S. election.
That break with longstanding bipartisan policy toward dealing with Russia, or any foreign nation, for that matter, succeeded in getting him the lion’s share of the media spotlight as Wednesday evening programming kicked off for rival Hillary Clinton’s Democratic National Convention. But it was a leap few fellow Republicans were ready to make — with some in the party suggesting it smacked of “treason.”
The backlash began immediately after Trump’s extended riff on Russia at a Wednesday morning press conference, in which he called for Russia to “find” and release 30,000 emails deleted from Clinton’s private email server. Trump went on to promise a better relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin if elected president, saying he’d “look at” easing sanctions and recognizing Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula—something at odds with current U.S. policy–but most of the focus came back to the emails.
“I will tell you this, Russia, if you’re listening I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Donald Trump said earlier Wednesday, referencing the thousands of emails that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent over her private email server that her lawyers had not turned over to the State Department, deeming them to be personal in nature. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
He went on to add, on Twitter, “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!”
Those remarks, which came a day after Clinton became the first woman nominated as a major party’s presidential candidate, were “tantamount to treason,” said William Inboden, a member of the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration, in an earlier interview with POLITICO.
“I thought it was a wildly irresponsible thing for any American to say, much less a candidate for the presidency of the United States,” said Tom Nichols, a former GOP Senate aide and a current professor at the Naval War College, when asked about Trump’s remarks. “It’s not just out of the mainstream—in terms of presidential candidates, it’s so far out of the mainstream, it’s a totally different solar system.”
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Trump is no stranger to going it alone, nor to bucking the party line, but following the press conference, his campaign went into damage control mode, seeking to reset the widely drawn conclusion that Trump was urging Russia to hack Clinton’s emails. Adviser Jason Miller went on a tweetstorm insisting Trump only meant that Russia should turn over the emails to the FBI if they already had them, and not work pro-actively to acquire them.
“To be clear, Mr. Trump did not call on, or invite, Russia or anyone else to hack Hillary Clinton’s e-mails today,” tweeted Jason Miller, a senior communications aide to the real estate mogul. “Trump was clearly saying that if Russia or others have Clinton’s 33,000 illegally deleted emails, they should share them w/ FBI immed.” (A different Trump aide did not answer repeated inquiries on how Russia would acquire those emails without hacking.)
And in an excerpt of a Fox News interview set to air Thursday morning, Trump appears to further distance himself from the interview.
“Of course I’m being sarcastic. And they don’t even know frankly if it’s Russia. They have no idea if it’s Russia, if it’s China, if it’s somebody else. Who knows who it is?” he says, according to an excerpt tweeted out by the network. “And what they said on those emails is a disgrace, and they’re just trying to deflect from that.”
But on Wednesday, Trump declined to say that he would urge Putin to stay out of American politics. “I’m not going to tell Putin what to do,” he said. “Why should I tell Putin what to do?”
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Nichols, a frequent Trump critic, noted that “we’re in a lot of hacking wars already.” But that doesn’t make encouraging more—which, in his view, is what Trump did—any more acceptable.
“It’s bad enough he doesn’t understand the gravity of what he said, but that he’s giving encouragement to a hostile foreign power is unconscionable,” Nichols said. “I don’t think he’s joking. He doubled down on it. Once off the cuff, it’s a joke. Twice, it’s policy.”
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My comments on Trump, #Russia, and the #DNCleak in @Politico.https://t.co/tn7weEYTy3
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 28, 2016
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