The Democrats took offense last week when GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump sarcastically expressed hope that Russian spy agencies would locate Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 missing e-mails.

Trump’s remark took direct aim at the private e-mail server Clinton illegally maintained wile serving as secretary of state. He was referring to the e-mails she said her lawyers had weeded out and discarded as unimportant — yoga lessons, recipes and such — before turning the remaining e-mails over to the Justice Department in 2014.

In a July 5 statement clearing Clinton of criminal wrongdoing, FBI Director James Comey said these e-mails no longer exist. Neither does the hard drive that once contained them. It’s been scrubbed clean.

But Trump was making a sideways comment about another set of e-mails: correspondence supposedly hacked from a Democratic National Committee server, hijacked sometime earlier this year and “dumped” on the eve of last week’s Democratic National Convention.

The dumped e-mails confirmed contentions by Clinton challenger Sen. Bernie Sanders that party leaders were working in favor of Clinton’s campaign for the nomination. The fallout precipitated the resignation of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz as DNC chairwoman. Party CEO Amy Dacey, chief finance officer Brad Marshall and communications director Luis Miranda left their jobs Tuesday.

The White House said it had “high confidence” from its intelligence agencies that the leak of the DNC e-mails was the work of the Russian government. Somehow, the White House’s “high confidence” transformed into an insinuation that the Russians might be actively seeking the 30,000 inconsequential e-mails from Clinton’s undocumented server — even though the e-mails and the hard drive that once contained them are said to no longer exist.

And it didn’t take long for the insinuation to become a condemnation of the Trump campaign for encouraging a foreign state to meddle in the American political process.

How soon we forget.

Seventeen months ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood before the United States Congress to criticize “a very bad deal” that was pending between the Obama administration and Iran. The proposed nuclear arms agreement would not take away the Islamic republic’s ability to ultimately obtain nuclear weapons, Netanyahu said.

Maybe Americans did not realize at the time that Netanyahu was fighting for his own political future as well his nation’s nuclear security.

Netanyahu spoke on March 3, 2015, exactly two weeks before the Israeli national election in which the prime minister and his conservative Likud Party narrowly won re-election.

One of the key campaign workers opposed to Netanyahu was an American named Jeremy Bird, the field director of Obama’s 2012 campaign and current adviser to the Clinton campaign.

Bird advised the group V15, an Israeli political group which patterned itself after community organizers in the U.S.

V15 reportedly got help from OneVoice, an organization that describes itself as “an international grassroots movement that amplifies the voice of mainstream Israelis and Palestinians, empowering them to propel their elected representatives toward the two-state solution.”

OneVoice programs have received at least $350,000 from the United States government, although V15 leaders said they did not benefit from one penny of that money. They said the U.S. funding stopped in November 2014.

There’s the appearance of motive in an Obama administration that shows little affection for Netanyahu, particularly in his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal.

Likud Party members raised the issue of U.S. funding during the 2015 campaign. It made few ripples in the American media.

Apparently, the Democratic Party elite didn’t think an outside country’s meddling in another nation’s political affairs was a big deal then.

They must have changed their minds last week, after their candidate was the target.