After the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) were hacked and Wikileaks published emails of several American politicians, Donald Trump appealed to Russian hackers to find 33,000 emails of Hilary Clinton. Trump’s speech referred to last year’s email affair when Clinton transferred the contents of her mailbox to the state archive with a long delay. During her tenure as the Secretary of State, Clinton used her private email server instead of the government server, in breach of the regulations on state secrets. Opponents accuse her of deleting potentially damning emails, while Clinton claims that these were her private emails.

The email messages published by Wikileaks show that the officially impartial Democratic National Committee was accommodating Clinton in her rivalry with Bernie Sanders. Robby Mook, the head of Clintons campaign, blamed Russia for the cyber-attack. However, Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for the Russian president, rejected these accusations.

In the U.S., Trump’s speech was received negatively and considered to be an appeal for foreign interference in the democratic process. Paul Musgrave, a University of Massachusetts professor who studies American foreign policy commented: “Being shocked into speechlessness is not the sort of thing you are really used to in the business of foreign policy analysis”.

Read more (BBC) >>
Read more (The New York Times) >>
Read more (The Washington Post) >>