Donald Trump’s comments drew swift, bipartisan rebukes for his apparent encouragement of cyber-espionage by an adversarial nation against a political enemy. | AP Photo Trump in 2013: He'd be 'major fan' of Snowden if he revealed Obama records Here's a brief history of Trump's tweets on hackers, hacking, Snowden and spying.

Donald Trump has repeatedly called for the execution of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, but in 2013, he suggested there was one way he could get back into the mogul’s good graces.

“Snowden is a spy who should be executed—but if … he could reveal Obama’s records, I might become a major fan,” Trump wrote in October 2013, in a tweet that also made reference to Obamacare.


The little-noticed tweet adds context to Trump’s latest controversy: a suggestion Wednesday that Russia should help expose his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. “I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” the GOP presidential nominee said at a news conference in Florida. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Trump’s comments drew swift, bipartisan rebukes for his apparent encouragement of cyber-espionage by an adversarial nation against a political enemy. But as the 2013 tweet reveals it wasn’t his first suggestion that he’d look favorably on enemy spying — if it helped his cause.

Trump also tweeted in 2014 that he hoped hackers would dig up President Barack Obama’s college records to check his “place of birth.”

"Attention all hackers: You are hacking everything else so please hack Obama's college records (destroyed?) and check 'place of birth,'" he tweeted at the time.

In the same month Trump tweeted about Snowden, he also made clear that he expects some level of international cyberspying — a topic that had blown up in the preceding months because of Snowden’s leaks.

“Fact — all the countries complaining about us spying on them spy on us. They just don't get caught—stupid!” Trump tweeted.

But Trump also made clear he has little tolerance for breaches of his own cybersecurity.

In 2013, Trump claimed he'd been hacked after his account tweeted, and subsequently deleted, a lyric from rapper Lil' Wayne. The tweet: "These h--- think they classy, well that's the class I'm skippen."

He subsequently tweeted: “My Twitter has been seriously hacked—and we are looking for the perpetrators."

It’s unclear if the hackers were ever caught.