In June 2016, the Democratic National Committee said that it believed it was hacked by Russia. The details of the actions Russian officials allegedly took were revealed in the indictment Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced this afternoon. On July 27, 2016, Trump, now infamously, encouraged Russian hackers to continue their work and to hack Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “Russia, if you’re listening,” he said, “I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”
That evening, according to today’s indictment, Russian hackers, who had been targeting the Clinton campaign and the DCCC along with the DNC for months already, attempted for the first time to spear-phish “email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office.”
They also stepped up their efforts against the Clinton campaign and “targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign.”
But as indications that Russians were behind the hacks that rattled Democrats in 2016 became more and more clear, Trump repeatedly denied or cast doubt on whether the attacks outlined in today’s indictment happened. Here are a few instances.
June 15, 2016: In a statement, Trump said, “we believe it was the DNC that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate and failed party leader. Too bad the DNC doesn’t hack Crooked Hillary’s, 33,000 missing emails.”
September 27, 2016: At the first presidential debate, after Clinton mentioned the DNC hack, Trump replied, “I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC. She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia, but I don’t — maybe it was. I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK? You don’t know who broke in to DNC.”
October 9, 2016: At the second presidential debate, Trump said, “Anytime anything wrong happens, they like to say the Russians are — [Clinton] doesn’t know if it’s the Russians doing the hacking. Maybe there is no hacking. But they always blame Russia. And the reason they blame Russia because they think they’re trying to tarnish me with Russia.”
December 2016: In an interview with Time magazine, Trump said, “I don’t believe they interfered. That became a laughing point, not a talking point, a laughing point. Any time I do something, they say ‘oh, Russia interfered.’ Why not get along with Russia? And they can help us fight ISIS, which is both costly in lives and costly in money. And they’re effective and smart. It could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey. I believe that it could have been Russia and it could have been any one of many other people. Sources or even individuals.”
December 15, 2016: Trump tweeted:
February 16, 2017: In a press conference, Trump said, “I guess one of the reasons I’m here today is to tell you the whole Russian thing — that’s a ruse. That’s a ruse.” In the same press conference he said, “You have seen that they tried to hack us and they failed. The DNC did not do that. And if they did it, they could not have been hacked. But they were hacked, and terrible things came.”
April 30, 2017: In an interview with CBS’s John Dickerson, Trump said, “Knowing something about hacking, if you don’t catch a hacker, OK, in the act, it’s very hard to say who did the hacking. With that being said, I’ll go along with Russia. It could have been China. It could have been a lot of different groups.”
May 11, 2017: In the same interview with NBC’s Lester Holt in which Trump admitted he had fired former FBI Director James Comey because of the Russia investigation, Trump said, “When I decided to just do it I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.”
July 12, 2017: After meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Germany, Trump told Reuters he had spent 20 minutes talking to Putin about election meddling. “I said, ‘Did you do it?’ And he said, ‘No, I did not. Absolutely not.’ I then asked him a second time in a totally different way. He said absolutely not.” In the same interview, he added, of Putin, “Somebody did say if he did do it, you wouldn’t have found out about it. Which is a very interesting point.”
September 27, 2017: After an announcement from Facebook about ads purchased by Russians to influence the election, Trump tweeted:
November 11, 2017: After meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Trump told reporters that Putin “said he didn’t meddle — I asked him again. You can only ask so many times. I just asked him again. He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did.”
That, of course, is just a partial list of Trump’s comments about the 2016 election hacking, questioning whether Russia was in fact the perpetrator — the question today’s indictment appears to answer. Trump was reportedly briefed on the indictment before Rosenstein’s noon announcement.
A timeline of Trump’s larger effort to shed doubt on the investigation into that hacking would include many more entries, and would extend through this morning, when, in a joint press conference with Britain’s Prime Minister, Theresa May, he called the investigation a “rigged witch hunt.”
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