Hillary Clinton imagined a scenario Wednesday where a 2020 Democratic candidate openly asked China to obtain Donald Trump's tax returns, likening it to Donald Trump suggesting Russia find Clinton's deleted 30,000 emails from her private server.
Clinton told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow the U.S. hadn't taken sufficient action to guard against future cyber warfare operations following her 2016 defeat, which she and Democrats have blamed in large part on Russian interference.
"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 is anywhere near as good as the Russians is China," Clinton said. "So why should Russia have all the fun? And since Russia is clearly backing Republicans, why don't we ask China to back us?'
"I hereby tonight ask China—" Maddow said, imitating the hypothetical situation.
"That's right," Clinton said. "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. 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 cyber tools looking for Trump's tax returns, and then extracts and them and then passes them to whatever the new Wikileaks happens to be, and they start being unravelled and disclosed, nothing wrong with that."
"I mean, if you're going let Russia get away with what they did, and are still doing according to Christopher Wray, the current FBI director who said that last week. 'They're in our election systems, we're worried about 2020,' he said," 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."
On July 27, 2016, after accepting the Republican nomination that year, Trump publicly called on Russia to find the "30,000 emails that are missing" from Clinton's server.