By Dan Murphy
I’ll be the first to admit I’m sick and tired of watching Sean Hannity on Fox News every weeknight at 9 p.m. start his broadcast by going after Hillary Clinton and the “Deep State” that refused to investigate her missing emails. On the other side of the political argument, Rachel Maddow on MSNBC usually highlights a President Donald Trump misstep or tweet, or negative story about him in the NY Times or Washington Post.
One evening last month, while flipping back and forth between Hannity and Maddow, I listened to former Secretary of State and Westchester resident Hillary Clinton pose the following scenario to Maddow:
“Imagine, Rachel, that you had one of the Democratic nominees for 2020 on your show, and that person said, ‘You know, the only other adversary of ours who’s anywhere near as good as the Russians is China. So why should Russia have all the fun? And since Russia is clearly backing Republicans, why don’t we ask China to back us.’
“And not only that, ‘China, if you’re listening, why don’t you get Trump’s tax returns? I’m sure our media would richly reward you,’” Clinton said. “Now, according to the Mueller report, that is not conspiracy because it’s done right out in the open. So if after this hypothetical Democratic candidate says this on your show, within hours, all of a sudden, the IRS offices are bombarded with incredibly sophisticated cybertools looking for Trump’s tax returns, and then extracts them and then passes them to whatever the new WikiLeaks happens to be and they start being unraveled and disclosed – nothing wrong with that.”
She added: “So, hey, let’s have a great power contest, and let’s get the Chinese in on the side of somebody else. Just saying that shows how absurd the situation we find ourselves in.”
Clinton’s comments were similar to what then-presidential candidate Trump said at a rally in 2016: “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. Let’s see if that happens.”
Two days after Trump made those comments, which he now says he made in jest, Wikileaks dumped thousands of stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee. According to the Mueller report, Trump privately and repeatedly “asked individuals affiliated with his campaign to find the deleted Clinton emails.”
Following Trump’s comments, Russian hackers working “after hours” tried “for the first time” to hack email accounts used by Clinton’s “personal office” and the campaign addresses of dozens of Clinton staffers, according to the July 2018 indictment of 12 hackers from Russia’s military intelligence agency known as the GRU.
Mueller’s report concludes that it “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in the election interference activities.”
Clinton while speaking about a hypothetical, did cleverly use Trump’s own words against him. She made her comments on the Rachael Maddow Show on May 1.
On May 8, the NY Times ran a feature story titled, “Decade in the Red: Trump Tax Figures Show Over $1 Billion in Business Losses,” which show specific details about Trump’s taxes in the 1980s and 90s.
“Ten years of tax information obtained by The New York Times paints a different, and far bleaker picture of his deal-making abilities and financial condition,” wrote Times columnists Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig. “The data – printouts from Mr. Trump’s official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, with the figures from his federal tax form, the 1040, for the years 1985 to 1994 – represents the fullest and most detailed look to date at the president’s taxes, information he has kept from public view.
“The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses – largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.”
Are Clinton’s comments, and the IRS data on Trump that the NY Times received, related? Did the Chinese respond to her hypothetical and somehow got the Trump tax information and forwarded it to the Times? Or is this all a coincidence?
Trump continues to release his tax returns. Democrats in Congress are trying to obtain copies of six years of Trump’s taxes but so far have been rejected by the IRS. Trump has been saying for years that, because he is currently under audit by the IRS, he cannot release his taxes.
