You just have to hand it to the Democrats. Not that they have a monopoly on outlandish, stupid commentary, but they're certainly straining their strong plurality on outlandish stupidity with the whole Russian hacker story.
I was actually listening live when Donald Trump held a press conference last week outside Miami. I know it used to be the unwritten rule that presidential candidates laid low during the opponents' convention, but let's face it -- if a candidate of either party was going to hold an open session with reporters during the DNC, it was going to have to be Trump, since Hillary is now eight months removed from her last one, in which she answered all of seven questions.
Trump answered more than that many in just the time after he said "OK, one more question" the first time. You'd think the press would at least cut him some slack, at least he answers their questions.
The answer, of course, that got all the fun going was when, after answering an insane number of questions on the equally insane topic of his business dealings with Russia (in light of press assumptions that it was Russians who provided the leaked embarrassing DNC emails), he added this to his reply:
"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."
You would have thought that he had just made a racist slur. All through the press and the political left (but I repeat myself), there were cries of outrage. Claire McCaskill, the senator from Missouri, actually wanted him investigated for violating some law she named, by somehow encouraging foreign governments to hack USA servers.
Now, first I would actually like for the FBI to do just that. Go ahead, start an investigation. Of course the "investigation" would go on for about five and a half minutes before the special agent in charge held a press conference to drop the effort and declare that "Even U.S. senators can be stupid. We're not wasting real FBI time investigating what was a freaking joke." That would sufficiently embarrass the Hillarists, I think.
Secondly, it was a freaking joke, and a joke about the press! Has the press, which actually gets to talk to Trump (unlike his opponent), not listened to Donald Trump answering questions long enough to know when he is being serious and when he is making fun of Hillary and of her playing fast and loose with the law and with national security information? It was a joke. I laughed when he said it.
But here's the thing, and it relates particularly to morons like Claire McCaskill who are actually trying to make a Federal case out of it, quite literally.
Even if you tried to argue that what Trump said wasn't a joke -- and we know it was -- look at what he actually said in context. He said, "I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."
The 30,000 emails were -- say it all together -- on Hillary Clinton's email server, the one she set up to avoid exposure to FOIA inquiries in defiance of Federal law. That's where they were deleted from by her lawyers, remember?
So how in Hades could Donald Trump, or anyone else for that matter, expect the Russians to be able to produce those emails now, given that the server was (A) wiped clean (not "with a cloth"), (B) given over to the FBI after having been wiped, and (C) is now in some evidence room at the FBI, shut off, disconnected from power and the Internet?
No, quite obviously to you, me and anyone else with at least half a brain (which excludes the press and U.S. senators, apparently), Trump's joke on the press was presupposing that her server already had been hacked because it was not secured when she was Secretary of State, and that if the emails existed in hack-land the Russians already had them. If they didn't already have them, they sure couldn't get them off a disconnected, powered-down server in an FBI evidence room.
It behooves me to point out, of course, that if somehow the Russians were mysteriously able to produce all those 30,000 emails, the only thing they'd know that they did not already know, according to Hillary's sworn testimony, would be the wedding plans of Chelsea Clinton (which are a bit dated, a baby or two later) and Hillary's yoga schedule, which is something you'd rather not see.
I kind of hope this comes up at one of those debates in October. I hope it's one of those particular lefties in the press that asks Trump a question about it, and he has a nicely prepared answer shredding the questioner with something like "Did you even watch that news conference? Did it not even occur to you that the server where the emails were hadn't been accessible to a hacker for months before that statement, or are you as uneducated about technology as Hillary Clinton claims to be?"
One can only hope that by November the Democrats would have been embarrassed out of the possibility of retaining the White House.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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