Remember when an American presidential candidate called for a hostile foreign power to conduct espionage against his opponent? It's easy to lose track in an avalanche of Russia news, but in September, Donald Trump asked Vladimir Putin's ace hackers to "find the 30,000 emails that are missing" from Hillary Clinton's infamous private server. Since Trump and his allies were also alleging those emails contained classified information that Clinton had mishandled and wanted to cover up, Trump was in effect asking the Russians—again, not our friends—to acquire highly sensitive U.S. national security and diplomatic information and release it publicly—and, you know, look at it themselves.

Except apparently that was all a joke, at least according to Sean Spicer. In his Double Secret Press Briefing today (No cameras allowed!), the White House press secretary explained his boss was only kidding about that whole espionage-for-political-gain thing:

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Sean says Trump "was joking" (!!!) when he asked Russian to hack Hillary's emails during the campaign. — Glenn Thrush (@GlennThrush) June 26, 2017

So was Trump joking, as his spokesman now claims—and, as Politico reported, a few surrogates claimed at the time? Let's go to the videotape:

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VIDEO: Trump: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing..." https://t.co/NEGclzLXtP — Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) July 27, 2016

Wow, that was a funny one. So was this tweet, in which Trump recycled the gag—with 3,000 extra emails for extra laughs—right after. In a familiar tune, just as his aides were trying to walk back his statement, he doubled down and completely cut their legs out from under them:

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If Russia or any other country or person has Hillary Clinton's 33,000 illegally deleted emails, perhaps they should share them with the FBI! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2016

But wait—there's more! Reporters present for the original joke remember that Trump grew increasingly angry when confronted on the comments by NBC News' Katy Tur, and ended up admitting that he had no problem in principle with asking Russia to get involved.

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At the July 2016 news conference? Forgive me, but no. Trump & @KatyTurNBC basically got in a shouting match over it. https://t.co/t6HN3ysBwQ — Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) June 26, 2017

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Not only was Trump not joking, he grew angrier when challenged on it by @KatyTurNBC Told her to “be quiet” https://t.co/yX2FIfP2Kx — Dafna Linzer (@DafnaLinzer) June 26, 2017

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Maybe. But then I asked him if it gave him pause to ask a foreign country to hack into anyone's email in the US. Trump said, no. It did not. https://t.co/QJdyyubfOC — Katy Tur (@KatyTurNBC) June 26, 2017

This is some high comedy, alright.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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