Trump Says Without Evidence That China Hacked Clinton Email Server : NPR

President Trump tweeted early Wednesday that China was behind a hack of former presidential opponent Hillary Clinton’s emails, in an obvious reference to an article revealed by the conservative Daily Caller web site.

China denied the allegation.

The article, by reporter Richard Pollack, cites two nameless sources and says a Chinese-owned firm primarily based outdoors of Washington, D.C., “hacked Hillary Clinton’s personal server all through her time period as secretary of state and obtained almost all her emails.”

Trump had tweeted a few hours earlier in one other obvious reference to the story.

According to the report, the corporate served as a entrance group for the Chinese authorities. Computer code embedded in Clinton’s electronic mail server, positioned at her home in upstate New York, copied “almost all of her emails and forwarded them to the Chinese firm,” the web site says.

U.S. intelligence businesses have concluded that Russia was behind a marketing campaign to affect the 2016 election and was chargeable for the hacking of emails of the Democratic National Committee in addition to for Clinton’s marketing campaign chairman, John Podesta. The topic of the Daily Caller’s article is separate from that hack.

In July 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey concluded that whereas Clinton’s use of a non-public server for official enterprise had been “extraordinarily careless,” he advisable no prices towards her. Despite that conclusion and Clinton’s election loss, the White House and Republicans in Congress continued to call for investigating Clinton’s use of a non-public electronic mail server from her time as secretary of state.

“The FBI spent hundreds of hours investigating, and located no proof of intrusion. That’s a truth,” the Daily Caller quoted Clinton spokesperson Nick Merrill as saying. “But in an age the place details are different and fact is not fact, it is no shock that an outlet just like the Daily Caller would attempt to distract us from very actual and really rapid threats to our democracy introduced by the person occupying the White House.”

“This is not the primary time we have heard comparable sorts of allegations,” Hua Chunying, China’s international ministry spokesperson, instructed reporters in Beijing on Wednesday. “China is a staunch defender of cybersecurity. We firmly oppose and crack down on any types of Internet assaults and the stealing of secrets and techniques,” she added, in line with Reuters.

Trump stated in April 2017 that it “may have been China, may have been plenty of totally different teams” behind the hack of Democratic emails that has been blamed on Russia.

Since profitable the 2016 election, Trump has repeatedly taken to Twitter to excoriate Clinton and name for a brand new probe of her emails. He has tweeted about Clinton every month since his election win, often a number of occasions. This month, he has stepped up the tempo of such tweets, referencing his erstwhile election opponent a minimum of 27 occasions.