2016 ELECTION/E-MAILS/HILLARY CLINTON/MICHAEL FLYNN/RUSSIA INVESTIGATION/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Donald J. Trump ordered the man who would later serve briefly as his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, to find thousands of missing emails from Hillary Clinton’s computer server at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign, the special counsel’s report revealed on Thursday [4-18-19]. The episode is among the closest that investigators came to uncovering an instance in which Mr. Trump himself appeared to use whatever means necessary to locate the messages, though it stops short of saying he encouraged a breach of his opponent’s computers, networks or email accounts. Mr. Trump had insisted at the time that he was only joking when he encouraged Russian hackers to find and disclose 30,000 deleted emails from Mrs. Clinton’s servers. Behind the scenes, Mr. Trump was serious, according to the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. It said that Mr. Flynn, by then a retired three-star Army intelligence officer, told the investigators ‘that Trump made this request repeatedly, and Flynn subsequently contacted multiple people in an effort to obtain the emails.’ As it turned out, Russia’s military intelligence unit and supporters of Mr. Trump’s campaign had — apparently independently — sought the email trove, convinced that it contained embarrassing material that could prove decisive on Election Day.”
–David E. Sanger, “Trump Ordered Aides to Search for Clinton Emails, While the Russians Already Were Looking,” The New York Times online, April 18, 2019