Donald Trump is guilty of a lot of reckless and irresponsible rhetoric. Most of this can be chalked up to his nature, but it doesn’t help that the media tend to reward him with excitable coverage, further encouraging him. Indeed, their selective outrage over Trump’s remarks often seems to give him what he values most: attention and notoriety and a new grievance to feed to his hungry fans.
Take the press conference last week where he said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Hillary Clinton] emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” We can’t and won’t defend the remark. Trump later tried to clarify his intent by 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!”
The immediate, unified, and overwhelming outrage from the media over this episode is nonetheless revealing. Our New York Times mobile phone alert read, “Donald J. Trump Calls on Russia to Hack Hillary Clinton’s Email, Essentially Sanctioning a Foreign Power’s Cyberspying.” Well, not exactly. The issue here is that in all probability Russia already has Hillary Clinton’s emails, because she selfishly and foolishly stored them on an insecure private server, so as to keep them from the prying eyes of journalists armed with FOIA requests and, later on, historians who benefit from the archiving of official government documents, including emails. She thereby made her own private communications and, much worse, sensitive government secrets more accessible to the unscrupulous eyes of foreign intelligence services and malicious hackers. That’s why the sort of thing she did, when done by others, is commonly prosecuted as a violation of laws passed to safeguard national security.
So if what Trump said could “constitute treason,” as law professor Laurence Tribe put it, what would he call cavalierly leaving classified information vulnerable to America’s enemies? If the Russians happen to have emails that could be used to blackmail someone who might be the next president, whose fault is that? Clinton’s official campaign response was to call Trump’s remarks “a national security issue,” which looks like a tacit admission that the emails she deleted may have contained something other than yoga appointments and family gossip.
Then there’s the terrifying reality that not even Hillary Clinton or her lawyers know all of what’s in the emails they deleted. That’s because no one read them before purging them—they simply searched for emails containing certain keywords and deleted them.
The Scrapbook thinks Trump’s sarcasm, if that’s what it was, was unworthy of a presidential candidate. Russian espionage is not a laughing matter. What we fail to see is how the same media that came down so harshly on Trump were so forgiving of Hillary Clinton’s recklessness in jeopardizing classified documents.
