At least three news outlets were leaked confidential material from inside the Donald Trump campaign, including its report vetting JD Vance as a vice presidential candidate. So far, each has refused to reveal any details about what they received.
Instead, Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post have written about a potential hack of the campaign and described what they had in broad terms.
Their decisions stand in marked contrast to the 2016 presidential campaign, when a Russian hack exposed emails to and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. The website Wikileaks published a trove of these embarrassing missives, and mainstream news organizations covered them avidly.
Politico wrote over the weekend about receiving emails starting July 22 from a person identified as “Robert” that included a 271-page campaign document about Vance and a partial vetting report on Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also considered as a potential vice president. Both Politico and the Post said that two people had independently confirmed that the documents were authentic.
“Like many such vetting documents,” The Times wrote of the Vance report, “they contained past statements with the potential to be embarrassing or damaging, such as Mr. Vance’s remarks casting aspersions on Mr. Trump.”
Whodunit?
What’s unclear is who provided the material. Politico said it did not know who “Robert” was and that when it spoke to the supposed leaker, he said, “I suggest you don’t be curious about where I got them from.”
The Trump campaign said it had been hacked and that Iranians were behind it. While the campaign provided no evidence for the claim, it came a day after a Microsoft report detailed an effort by an Iranian military intelligence unit to compromise the email account of a former senior advisor to a presidential campaign. The report did not specify which campaign.
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign, said over the weekend that “any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies.”
The FBI released a brief statement Monday that read: “We can confirm the FBI is investigating this matter.”
The Times said it would not discuss why it had decided not to print details of the internal communications. A spokesperson for the Post said: “As with any information we receive, we take into account the authenticity of the materials, any motives of the source and assess the public interest in making decisions about what, if anything, to publish.”
Brad Dayspring, a spokesperson for Politico, said editors there judged that “the questions surrounding the origins of the documents and how they came to our attention were more newsworthy than the material that was in those documents.”
Indeed, it didn’t take long after Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate for various news organizations to dig up unflattering statements that the Ohio senator had made about him.
A lesson from 2016?
It’s also easy to recall how, in 2016, candidate Trump and his team encouraged coverage of documents on the Clinton campaign that Wikileaks had acquired from hackers. It was widespread: A BBC story promised “18 revelations from Wikileaks’ hacked Clinton emails” and Vox even wrote about Podesta’s advice for making superb risotto.
Brian Fallon, then a Clinton campaign spokesperson, noted at the time how striking it was that concern about Russian hacking quickly gave way to fascination over what was revealed. “Just like Russia wanted,” he said.
Unlike this year, the Wikileaks material was dumped into the public domain, increasing the pressure on news organizations to publish. That led to some bad decisions: In some cases, outlets misrepresented some of the material to be more damaging to Clinton than it actually was, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote “Cyberwar,” a book about the 2016 hacking.
This year, Jamieson said she believed news organizations made the right decision not to publish details of the Trump campaign material because they can’t be sure of the source.
“How do you know that you’re not being manipulated by the Trump campaign?” Jamieson said. She’s conservative about publishing decisions “because we’re in the misinformation age,” she said.
Thomas Rid, director of the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at Johns Hopkins, also believes that the news organizations have made the right decision, but for different reasons. He said it appeared that an effort by a foreign agent to influence the 2024 presidential campaign was more newsworthy than the leaked material itself.
But one prominent journalist, Jesse Eisinger, senior reporter and editor at ProPublica, suggested the outlets could have told more than they did. While it’s true that past Vance statements about Trump are easily found publicly, the vetting document could have indicated which statements most concerned the campaign, or revealed things the journalists didn’t know.
Once it is established that the material is accurate, newsworthiness is a more important consideration than the source, he said.
“I don’t think they handled it properly,” Eisinger said. “I think they overlearned the lesson of 2016.”