“Let’s be clear about what this means: The Republican candidate for president has invited a hostile foreign power to conduct an unlawful cyberattack against his opponent and to make public emails she deemed personal and private.” So says The Washington Post in a July 30 editorial printed in this newspaper (“Trump makes bet on Russian spying”).

Yes, let’s be clear. At question are 30,000-plus emails deleted from a private and secret server hidden in Hillary Clinton’s home. This server was used by Clinton for her official State Department email communications, as well as some personal email use. The use of that server for U.S. government business was in direct contradiction to her oath of office as the secretary of state.

Trump knows that some eight months or more have passed since the Clinton secret server was seized by the FBI and sent to a FBI forensics lab for analysis. According to the director of the FBI, a number of top secret documents were discovered, documents that directly put at high risk the security of the U.S. both at home and abroad.

So if as is rumored, the Russians had hacked into the Clinton secret home server, and the server has now been offline for roughly the human gestation period, how could Trump be inviting the Russians to now take action to hack into the Clinton secret server looking for the missing emails?

Michael A. Cameron

Winthrop