On a late July day in 2016, Donald Trump, the GOP nominee for president, stood at a lectern in Florida, next to an American flag, and urged a U.S. adversary to become involved in the election campaign and find tens of thousands of emails wiped from the server of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
“Russia, if you’re listening,” he said at a news conference at one of his resorts, “I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”
That same day, July 27, several Russian government hackers launched an attack against the email accounts of staffers in Clinton’s personal office, according to a sweeping indictment Friday by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. At or around the same time, the hackers also targeted 76 email addresses used by the Clinton campaign, investigators said.