It was more than a year ago when, just a few weeks into his seemingly quixotic presidential campaign, Donald Trump had his first nasty encounter with NBC News reporter Katy Tur.
As Tur stumbled over her words a bit while asking a question last July about Trump’s immigration stance, the candidate openly mocked her, saying, “Come on, try getting it out.” After calling Tur a “very naïve person,” he added, “I don’t know if you’re going to put this on television, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
A few months later, during a rally in South Carolina, Trump singled-out the reporter by name, dubbing her, “Little Katy, third-rate journalist.”
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Undaunted, Tur has continued to cover Trump’s rise to become the Republican Party’s nominee for NBC News, and today asked him a vitally important question during what quickly turned into one of the most unnerving press conferences of his campaign—and that’s saying a lot.
At one point, Trump spoke directly to the Russians, who are suspected of orchestrating the hack into the DNC’s email system in order to help sway the election away from Hillary Clinton, saying, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”
“Do you have any qualms about asking a foreign government, Russia, China, anybody, to interfere, to hack into a system of anybody’s in this country?” Tur later asked the candidate. When Trump reiterated that he would like to see Russia “release” Clinton’s missing emails, she followed up with, “Does that not give you pause?”
“No, that gives me no pause,” Trump said. “You know what gives me more pause, that a person in our government, crooked Hillary Clinton—” Tur tried to interrupt, but Trump shot back, “Be quiet, I know you want to, you know, save her.”
“That a person in our government, Katy, would delete or get rid of 33,000 emails. That gives me a big problem,” he continued. “Now, if Russia or China or any other country has those emails, I mean to be honest with you, I’d love to see them.”
During an appearance on MSNBC following the press conference, Tur told MSNBC’s Tamron Hall, “I’m not good at being quiet and I won’t continue to be quiet in any way, shape or form.”
And perhaps in an attempt to disprove Trump’s claim that she’s only out to “save” Hillary Clinton, Tur used her Twitter account to give the candidate credit for making “one major valid point” during what was otherwise a disturbing display of ego and misinformation.
