Trump says GOP convention speech was 'optimistic,' not dark

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GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump denied Thursday that his speech at last week's Republican National Convention painted an overly bleak picture of America, instead claiming that he was merely stating the facts.

"It wasn't dark, it was optimistic" Trump told Fox News' "On The Record with Greta van Susteren." "I talk about the problems which President Obama didn't want to talk about [in his Democratic convention speech Wednesday]. I view it as, I state the facts, and then I say we're going to fix it."

The real estate mogul added that he was "being sarcastic" when he called on Russian hackers to search for 33,000 emails deleted from Clinton's private server.

"When you look at what she has done and how she has abused the system with her server, with the deletion of all of this information and these emails," Trump said. "I mean, you have to be sarcastic when you see something like that happen."

Trump also pushed back against pressure to release his tax returns, saying "most people don't care about it," and claiming that the content of Clinton's missing emails was a far more pressing matter.

"I think she's the wrong woman," Trump said of his general election opponent. "You look at her track record, it's dismal ... I just don't know, frankly how a person like this will be electable."