Trump Calls For Russian Cyber-Espionage To Recover Clinton’s 30,000 Deleted Personal Emails

With this in mind, GOP nominee Donald Trump is imploring those same Russian hackers to “finish the job”, so to speak, and release Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 emails that were deleted from her private email server. According to Clinton, these emails were personal in nature and unrelated to official State Department business.

Given the treasure trove of information that was gleaned from the DNC email leak, the possible recovery of thousands of deleted emails could potentially be beneficial to Trump’s campaign. "By the way, if [Russia] hacked, they probably have her 33,000 emails. I hope they do," said Trump at a press conference held today at one of his Doral, Florida properties. "They probably have her 33,000 emails that she lost and deleted.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Following the press conference, Trump took to Twitter to double down on his previous comments, tweeting:

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!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2016

For its part, Clinton campaign policy director Jake Sullivan issued the following statement regarding Trump’s call to action:

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. This has gone from being a matter of curiosity and a matter of politics, to being a national security issue.

This isn’t the first time that Clinton has come under fire thanks to the work of Russian hackers. Back in late June, it was revealed that hacker group Guccifer 2.0 allegedly breached Clinton Foundation servers and exposed large contributions from donors, possibly with political ties.