Tim Kaine: Trump Wasn’t Sarcastic On Russian Hacking, “He Was Being Ignorant”

The morning after Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for the White House, her running mate appeared on CNN to hit her opponent over his ‘sarcasm’ regarding Russian cyber attacks. Speaking to CNN’s Alisyn Camerota, Tim Kaine touched on a number of subjects, such as his shifting policy positions, his experience at this week’s Democratic National Convention and even his love of the harmonica.

However, the highlight of the interview was the Virginia Senator pointing out why Donald Trump’s comments about wanting the Russian government to hack into United States servers can’t just be brushed aside as a joke. As you may recall, earlier this week the real estate mogul raised eyebrows when he told Russia to search for Hillary Clinton’s emails because they’d be rewarded handsomely for their efforts.

According to Kaine, there was nothing sarcastic about Trump’s remarks. Nah, he was just being ignorant.

From CNN’s transcript:

CAMEROTA: Now that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are officially the nominees, they are set to begin getting the intelligence sharing that comes from all of our intelligence officials here in the country. Harry Reid, Senator Harry Reid said that he doesn’t believe Donald Trump should be privy to those. What do you think?

KAINE: Well, look, Donald Trump did something that was just completely out of any historical precedent this week when he basically asked Russia, hey, put your thumb on the scale of an American election. When he said, Russia should help me try to figure out if I can get an edge or a drop on Hillary Clinton, it really was outrageous. I serve on the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committee and let me tell you something, Alisyn — we have a dead solid cold that Russia does get engaged in trying to influence elections in other countries, whether it’s supporting parties that are pro-Russia and to their liking in other nations, or even using cyber attacks to create chaos on election day in nations in Eastern Europe, they’ve done that. And so when we know that they’ve done it, and when Donald Trump is basically trying to encourage them to do it with respect to U.S. election, I think an awful lot of people will see that and say that is temperamentally disqualification for the office.

CAMEROTA: Donald Trump says he was being sarcastic about that.

KAINE: You know what, I don’t have a sense of humor about cyber terrorism, and I don’t have a sense of humor about what Russia is up to. So he can say he’s being sarcastic now. I think he was just not being sarcastic, he was being ignorant.

Amazingly, Trump has yet to attack Kaine on Twitter over the interview, despite being active with his phone throughout the day Friday. Of course, it’s probably because he thinks Kaine is the former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean and hadn’t gotten any notifications that Kean has said shit about him.