Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly asked the People’s Republic of China in May to release President Donald Trump’s tax returns — exactly the same act that Democrats and the media claim warrants impeachment.

Clinton, the defeated 2016 Democratic Party nominee for president, appeared on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show on May 1, 2019. She repeated Trump’s joke from July 2016 — which was taken seriously enough by President Barack Obama and the intelligence community to provide a pretext for eavesdropping on the Trump campaign — in which he said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 [Clinton] e-mails that are missing.”

As Breitbart News reported in May, the former secretary of state told Maddow that since Senate Republicans declined to pass Democrat-sponsored bills to secure American elections against foreign interference, the left should openly enlist the aid of Chinese espionage (transcript via MSNBC):

Hillary Clinton: The Republicans in the Senate wouldn’t at all go forward with some of the bipartisan legislation that was meant to secure our elections under orders from the White House. … 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. So, why should Russia have all the fun? And since Russia is clearly backing Republicans, why don’t we ask China to back us. Rachel Maddow: I hereby tonight ask China – Hillary Clinton: That`s right. 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 unraveled 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. 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.

No one called for Clinton to be investigated, much less prosecuted.

This week, however, Democrats and journalists alike declared that Trump deserved to be impeached for calling, openly, for China and Ukraine to investigate alleged corruption tied to former Vice President Joe Biden, a 2020 candidate for the Democratic Party nomination.

Democrats have been searching for Trump’s old tax returns for years, convinced that they contain incriminating or at least politically embarrassing information. In 2017, Maddow produced his 2005 tax return — which showed he paid a significant amount in taxes.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.