US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says he “loves” whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks for its latest revelations about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
The New York businessman made the comments during a campaign event on Monday, days after a series of leaked emails revealed Clinton’s disconnection from the struggles of the middle class and her behind-the-scenes advocacy for the further prosperity of Wall Street and big corporations – contrary to her campaign rhetoric.
“I love WikiLeaks,” Trump told thousands of his supporters in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. “It’s amazing how nothing is secret today when you talk about the Internet.”
“In a speech behind closed doors, ‘Crooked Hillary’ said, ‘Terrorism is not a big threat to our nation,’” the candidate continued. “Terrorism is a big, big threat. We are riding into something very dangerous."
“In another closed-door speech, she wanted to have open borders and open trade with everybody. There go the rest of your jobs,” he added.
The comments prompted prolonged “Lock her up!” chants from the crowd.
The speech followed an incendiary second presidential debate on Sunday, where the two candidates removed the gloves and engaged in a bitter fight filled with personal attacks.
When the email issue was brought up during the debate, Clinton rushed to blame Russia for this and other cyber attacks in the past, accusing Moscow of trying to influence the elections in favor of Trump.
Previously, hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had revealed an insider effort by some party officials to push Clinton’s strong rival, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders out of the race for nomination.
During his speech on Monday, Trump brought up the other side of Clinton’s email fiasco, which is her use of a private server to exchange confidential emails during her tenure as the secretary of state and deleting a big chunk of them before turning the server over to officials.
“I have never been so ashamed of this country as I have with what’s going on with Hillary Clinton,” Trump said. “I have never seen anything like it. You have never seen anything like it, 33,000 emails – she deletes them.”