We thought the Tea Bagger high priestess Palin was a boon for the Democrats, tRump is the gift that keeps giving, Indeed.
7 Likes
Perhaps the DNC knows the missing emails are already hacked and will eventually be released, so this heavily played Russia card can then be used to fully discredit future releases.
2 Likes
Leon Panetta is scheduled to speak at the DNC this evening. I imagine he’ll have a few choice words to say about the issue.
7 Likes
So the fix is in?
12 Likes
Next: “Trump urges ISIS to attack America to demonstrate Obama’s weakness”
BTW: This piece could have been published word-for-word in The Onion and everyone would have had a good chuckle. Absolutelyfuckingunbelievable. He’s not even pretending not to be a Putin sycophant anymore.
25 Likes
I doubt that “Espionage against the US” extends to cover the hacking of a privately owned and maintained computer.
It is likely a violation of the CFAA, a law which is not exactly held in high esteem here at BB.
In addition, release of those emails could easily be considered whistleblowing in the public interest (unless of course they turn out to be all about yoga).
The Pentagon Papers case may be a useful precedent.
5 Likes
You’re really working hard to defend Trump and Putin, aren’t you? The hack last week wasn’t against Clinton’s private server, it was against the DNC email server. A useful precedent might be the last time a candidate ordered a breakin to the other party’s campaign headquarters - 1972, I think.
33 Likes
How many Americans actually know that, though? I’m guessing: depressingly few (and in the Venn diagram, that group and the group of potential Trump supporters overlaps by only a hair).
11 Likes
Trump’s comment was about Clinton’s “lost” (edit: deleted, not lost) emails, not about anything on a DNC server
Did you read the article?
3 Likes
So is Trump asking Russia to help Hillary, the FBI, the State Department. . . or his own campaign?
Let’s pretend something similar happened in 1956, and someone in the State Dept. lost a box full of correspondence, and then a Presidential candidate made a public appeal to Soviet spies to see if they could find it.
I mean, I understand your line of reasoning, but I think the opposite line of reasoning makes a lot more sense-- Trump doesn’t care about US security, he cares about winning the election at all costs. If she is guilty of deleting emails that implicate her in some kind of crime you still don’t ask a foreign power to help the investigation at the cost of our own security interests.
12 Likes
—LOST???—
Why not go all the way, and suggest that Hillary’s dog ate it??
The GOP presidential candidate is openly asking Russia to divulge intelligence they may have gathered against his rival.
I agree with Harry Reid: Trump cannot be trusted with security briefings. I don’t think it’s a stretch to consider this treasonous.
18 Likes
I used “lost” simply as a historical convenience, I couldn’t say a State Dept employee “burned correspondence” because then it would never be retrieved. I can’t think of something exactly like email that would apply to 1956.
The fact is, if you hate Hillary then you automatically believe she did something sinister.
I don’t hate her, remain unconvinced she really did something bad, but do leave that option open.
I remember how the GOP was relentless in trying to remove the Clintons from the WH at all costs, the rise of the conservative echo-chamber and whispering campaigns that detailed the “Clinton Death List” and intimations that Hillary was actually a lesbian, so I have some understanding of why she might use a private email server and delete personal stuff that’s not involved with the State Dept. (and the recently leaked emails are from the DNC, not the State Dept.)
“I am sick and tired of hearing about Hillary’s emails!” --Bernie Sanders
19 Likes
Here’s more information:
William Inboden, who served on the NSC during the George W. Bush administration, said Trump’s comments were “tantamount to treason.”
“Trump’s appeal for a foreign government hostile to the United States to manipulate our electoral process is not an assault on Hillary Clinton, it is an assault on the Constitution,” said Inboden, who now teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.
13 Likes
I know one thing: there’s no need to do a birth certificate check to see if Donald J Trump is American or not!
Because if he wants a foreign nation to conduct espionage against America he just openly solicits it regardless of where he was born.
5 Likes
How else does one attempt to achieve the state of mind that its target audience seems to experience on a daily basis?
2 Likes
The key word here is “find.” Given the hacking by the Russians of the DNC, it’s reasonable to assume Trump means “hey, Russians, go and hack Clinton and get the emails and release them.” I don’t think he means “hey, Russians, if you’ve got the emails them somewhere on your own servers, go find them so you can release them.” There’s a difference. But either way he’s asking the Russians to (again!) interfere with our presidential election, which is simply wrong. And I say this as someone who voted for Sanders and doesn’t particularly like Clinton. But she’s got to win against Trump. She’s the only one who has a chance in hell, and if she loses, we are in DEEP shit.
10 Likes
While I can in some ways appreciate the sentiment, there is no treason now since the US is not at war against any other countries. General animosity towards a country is not the same as them being an actual enemy.
6 Likes
I liked it when Snowden leaked all that stuff, and I liked the leak of the Pentagon Papers, and the Panama Papers. Transparency is a good thing. Whistleblowing is a good thing. I would love it if the rest of those emails showed up on WikiLeaks.
Things they might contain: deal-making with the DNC and policy conversations with campaign contributors.
5 Likes
Here’s the thing - I deeply dislike Trump. I think he probably sucks as a person, but that’s secondary to the fact that he’s the worst presidential candidate I’ve seen in my 40 year life span, and possibly the worst major party candidate ever.
That said, he’s clearly not to inviting foreign surveillance or espionage. He’s making a joke. Frankly, it’s a joke likely to be well-received by his followers. And when those of us with a brain pretend like it’s something more than that, we’re playing in to the narrative he wants to craft. He and his followers recognize this as the joke that it is and will lump this sort of reaction into the political correctness category.
When Sarah Palin complained about the gotcha media, she was on to something. Unfortunately for her, she considered legitimate, reasonable policy questions to be gotchas. The fact is though, that there is a tendency to intentionally misconstrue every possible joke or slip up and try to crucify the candidates on them.
Trump says and does enough stupid shit. We don’t need to ruin our credibility by making some up.
4 Likes
