Trump Urges Russia to Hack Clinton

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump called on Russia to try and hack the 30,000 emails missing from the personal server Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used as Secretary of State.

That came in a press conference Wednesday, prompting the New York Times to almost immediately report that Trump was "essentially encouraging an adversarial foreign power’s cyberspying on a secretary of state’s correspondence."

Russia is being investigated as the possible source of a Democratic National Committee email leak to WikiLeaks that resulted in the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Folks have been positing that perhaps Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind the hack as a way to meddle with the election given Trump's praise for the Russian leader, which he echoed again Wednesday, saying Putin "has much better leadership qualities than Obama, but who doesn't know that," according to an Associated Press video of the speech.

Trump did say he had "nothing to do with Russia," but then tweeted later: "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!"

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.