Trump Invites China to Hack His Emails—and Uncover All the Details of His Business Ties to Russian Oligarchs. Cool!

Well, by now y’all know that Donald Trump held a press conference today at which he invited Russia to hack into Hillary Clinton’s email server and retrieve the 33,000 emails she deleted.  When questioned about the propriety of encouraging anyone—much less a foreign power—to commit cybertheft, he said Russia probably already had the emails and that, if so, they should release them.

When asked whether it troubled him to urge the release of stolen information, Trump said … well, you the answer.

Okay, so Russia has his back, front, sides and center.  Which must be comforting for him, if not for us.  China, on the other hand … doesn’t.  Not in the same way, anyway.  And China’s hack expertise would make Russia’s look like high school computer lab class, I’d guess.

It’s hardly a secret—except to most American voters—that Trump has extensive business interests with very wealthy Russians, and wants to partner with Russians in businesses in Russia itself.*

So here’s where China comes in: Just today, Trump made it official that he won’t be releasing his tax returns, so you can stop holding your breadth.  But copies of his tax returns, not to mention other evidence of his financial dependence, probably are on Trump’s personal or business computers.  The obtaining and release of copies of them—including emails between Trump and his son Donald Jr., and Trump and his lawyers, and Trump and his accountants, and Trump and the oligarchs—would, to borrow from a comment of Trump’s at the press conference, be highly rewarded by the media.

And also to borrow from Trump’s comments today, I want to see them.

But of course Hillary Clinton, not being Donald Trump and all, can’t openly invite China to do this.  So I will.  I’m not Trump either, of course.  But I am just swapping out one country for another, and one U.S. presidential candidate for another.

And Trump did start it.  So it’s okay for me to do this, right?

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CORRECTION: *Paragraph edited significantly for accuracy. 7/28 at 11:41 a.m.