At least three news organizations have received confidential internal Donald Trump campaign documents, including information about the vetting of J.D. Vance as a running mate, but so far the organizations have refused to provide details about the documents they received.
Instead, Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post wrote stories about possible hacking of the campaign, outlining in broad terms what might have happened.
Their decision stands in contrast to the 2016 presidential election, when Russian hackers leaked emails between Hillary Clinton and campaign chairman John Podesta. The website WikiLeaks published a trove of embarrassing documents, and mainstream news outlets covered them enthusiastically.
Politico reported over the weekend that it had received emails from someone calling themselves “Robert” beginning on July 22. The emails included 271 pages of campaign documents about Vance, as well as portions of an investigative report on Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also considered as a running mate. Both Politico and The Washington Post reported that the two people independently verified the documents’ authenticity.
“Like many such documents,” The Times wrote about Vance’s report, “it contained embarrassing or potentially damaging past statements, including comments by Vance disparagingly about Trump.”
Who is the culprit?
What’s unclear is who provided the materials. Politico said it doesn’t know who “Robert” is, and that when it spoke with the alleged leaker, he said, “I don’t think you should care where I got it from.”
The Trump campaign claimed it had been hacked and that the Iranians were behind it. The campaign has not provided any evidence for its claim, but the day before, a Microsoft report detailed attempts by Iranian military intelligence units to break into the email account of a former senior adviser to the presidential campaign, without specifying which campaign.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Chang said over the weekend that “media outlets and news organizations that reprint documents and internal communications are following the orders of America’s enemies.”
The FBI released a brief statement on Monday saying, “We can confirm that the FBI is investigating this matter.”
The Times said it would not discuss why it decided not to publish details of the internal communications.A Post spokesman said: “As with any information we receive, we consider the veracity of the material, the motives of our sources and assess the public interest in deciding what or whether to publish.”
Politico spokesman Brad Dayspring said the company’s editors decided that “the questions about the documents’ origins and how they came to our attention were more newsworthy than their contents.”
Indeed, after Vance was announced as President Trump’s running mate, it didn’t take long for various news outlets to dig up incriminating comments the Ohio senator had made about him.
Lessons from 2016?
It’s also easy to recall that in 2016, candidate Trump and his team encouraged coverage of the Clinton campaign documents obtained by WikiLeaks from hackers. It was extensive: a BBC report promised “18 revelations from WikiLeaks’ hacked Clinton emails,” and Vox even ran Podesta’s advice on how to make a great risotto.
Brian Fallon, then a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said it was striking how quickly concerns about Russian hacking were replaced by interest in the revelations. “That’s exactly what Russia wanted,” he said.
Unlike this year, the WikiLeaks materials were released into the public domain, increasing pressure on news organizations to publish them. That led to some misjudgments, with some outlets misrepresenting parts of the materials in a way that made them more unfavorable to Clinton than they actually were, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote “Cyberwar,” a book about the 2016 hack.
Jamieson said earlier this year that he believed news organizations made the right decision not to publish details of the Trump campaign documents because their sources were unclear.
“How do we know it’s not being manipulated by the Trump campaign?” said Jamieson, who added that she was cautious about any publishing decisions because “we live in an age of misinformation.”
Thomas Rid, director of the Alperovich Institute for Cybersecurity at Johns Hopkins University, also thinks the news organizations made the right decision, but for a different reason: He said the activities of foreign agents trying to influence the 2024 presidential election appear more newsworthy than the leaked materials themselves.
But Jesse Eisinger, a prominent journalist who is a senior reporter and editor at ProPublica, suggested the outlet could have done more: While Vance’s past comments about Trump are certainly easy to find publicly, the dossier could have shown which comments were of most concern to the campaign or revealed facts that journalists didn’t know.
If the material is confirmed to be accurate, its newsworthiness is given more weight than its source, he said.
“I don’t think they handled it properly,” Eisinger said. “I think they overlearned the lessons of 2016.”