At least three news outlets have leaked confidential material from Donald Trump’s campaign, including a report examining JD Vance as a possible vice presidential candidate. So far, everyone has refused to reveal the details of what they received.
However, Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post have written about the campaign’s potential hacks and described what they have widely.
The decision is in stark contrast to the 2016 presidential campaign, when a Russian hack exposed emails to and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. The Wikileaks website published many of these embarrassing missives, and mainstream news organizations covered them up.
Politico wrote over the weekend about receiving an email from July 22 from a person identified as “Robert” that included a 271-page campaign document about Vance and a partial vetting report about Sen. Marco Rubio, who is also considered a potential vice president. Both Politico and the Post said two people had independently confirmed that the document was authentic.
“Like many such vetting documents,” The Times wrote of Vance’s report, “they contain potentially embarrassing or damaging past statements, such as Mr. Vance’s comments regarding Mr. Trump.”
Whodunit?
It is not clear who provided the material. Politico said it didn’t know who “Robert” was and when speaking to the alleged leaker, he said, “I suggest you don’t want to know where I got that from.”
The Trump campaign says it was hacked and that the Iranians were behind it. While the campaign offered no evidence for its claim, it came a day after a Microsoft report detailed an attempt by Iran’s military intelligence unit to compromise the email account of a former senior adviser to the president’s campaign. The report did not specify which campaign.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said over the weekend that “the media or media outlets that reprint documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of the enemy of America.”
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 decided not to print details of internal communications. A Post spokesman said: “As with any information we receive, we consider the authenticity of the material, the motives of any sources and assess the public interest in making decisions about what, if anything, to publish.”
Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for Politico, said editors there argued that “the question of the origin of the document and how it came to our attention is more important than the material contained in the document.”
Indeed, it didn’t take long after Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate for various news organizations to dig up the Ohio senator’s implausible claims about him.
Lessons from 2016?
It is also easy to remember how, in 2016, candidate Trump and his team encouraged the coverage of documents on the Clinton campaign that Wikileaks had acquired from hackers. Available: The BBC story promises “18 revelations from the Clinton emails hacked by Wikileaks” and Vox even wrote about Podesta’s advice for making the best risotto.
Brian Fallon, who later became a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, noted that concern over the Russian hacking quickly gave way to what was revealed. “That’s what Russia wants,” he said.
Unlike this year, Wikileaks material was thrown into the public domain, increasing pressure on news organizations to publish. That led to some bad decisions: In some cases, the outlets misrepresented some material that was more damaging to Clinton than it actually was, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote “Cyberwar,” a 2016 book about hacking.
This year, Jamieson said he believes news organizations made the right decision not to publish details of Trump campaign material because they were unsure of the source.
“How do you know you’re not being manipulated by the Trump campaign?” Jamieson said. He is conservative about publishing a decision “because we are in an age of misinformation,” he said.
Thomas Rid, director of the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at Johns Hopkins, also believes that news organizations have made the right decision, but for different reasons. He said efforts by foreign agents to influence the 2024 presidential campaign were more important than the leaked material.
But one prominent journalist, Jesse Eisinger, a senior reporter and editor at ProPublica, suggested that the outlet could have said more than it did. Despite the fact that Vance’s past statements about Trump are easy to find publicly, the vetting documents may reveal the most troubling statements about the campaign, or reveal things that reporters did not know about.
Once it is established that the material is accurate, newsworthiness is a more important consideration than source, he said.
“I don’t think it was handled properly,” Eisinger said. “I think they’ve learned the lessons of 2016.”
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David Bauder writes about the media for the AP. Follow him on http://twitter.com/dbauder.