Russia should find Hillary Clinton's missing emails, Trump says; is he inciting crime?
Donald Trump. Photo by a katz / Shutterstock.com
Updated: GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump said at a news conference on Wednesday that he hoped Russia would be able to find missing emails belonging to Hillary Clinton.
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” The New York Times, the Miami Herald and the Washington Post covered Trump’s remarks.
Clinton campaign officials have claimed Russia hacked emails of the Democratic National Committee to help Trump, but Trump denied any ties to Russia. He added that “they probably have her 33,000 emails” and “you’d see some beauties there.”
In the view of the New York Times, Trump is “essentially encouraging an adversarial foreign power’s cyberspying on a secretary of state’s correspondence.”
In an article for Bloomberg View, Harvard University law professor Noah Feldman considers whether Trump committed a crime by inciting imminent lawless action.
Feldman says “a plausible case” could be made that Trump intends for Russia or someone else to hack into the server, which is a federal crime. Trump apparently wants it to happen now and Vladimir Putin could take up the challenge.
But Trump’s statement would be protected under the First Amendment as a result of the imminence standard established in the Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio, Feldman says. The case established that a speaker is protected unless the government could identify “actual, identifiable people who were about to commit an unlawful act and were likely to do so as a result of the incitement.”
“That sort of imminence is lacking now,” Feldman says. “The Russian hackers are certainly out there—but we don’t know who they are, so it wouldn’t be possible to prove that his words were likely to incite them to crime.”
Updated at 3:50 p.m. to include Bloomberg View article by Noah Feldman.
