News outlets leaked Trump campaign insider material — and chose not to print it

At least three news outlets leaked confidential material from Donald Trump’s campaign, including the report vetting J.D. Vance as vice presidential candidate. So far, they have both declined to release details of what they received.

Instead, Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post wrote about a possible hack of the campaign and outlined what they had.

Their decisions stand clear 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 large number of these embarrassing messages, and mainstream news organizations eagerly reported them.

Politics wrote this weekend about receiving emails starting July 22 from an individual identified as “Robert” containing a 271-page campaign document on Vance and a partial vetting report on Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also considered a potential vice president. Both Politico and the Post said two people had independently confirmed the documents were authentic.

“Just like many such vetting documents,” says The Times wrote of the Vance report “contain past statements that had the potential to be embarrassing or damaging, such as Mr. Vance’s comments that discredited Mr. Trump.”

What is unclear is who supplied the material. Politico said it didn’t know who “Robert” was and that when it spoke to the so-called “leaker,” he said, “I suggest you’re not curious about where I got them.”

The Trump campaign said it had been hacked and that Iranians were behind it. Although the campaign provided no evidence for the claim, it came a day after a Microsoft report detailed an attempt by an Iranian military intelligence unit to compromise the email account of a former senior adviser to a presidential campaign. The report did not specify which campaign.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, said this weekend that “any media or news outlet that reprints documents or internal communications is doing the bidding of America’s enemies.”

The FBI released a short statement On Monday it said: “We can confirm that the FBI is investigating this matter.”

The Times said it would not discuss why it had decided not to print the details of the internal communications. A spokesperson for the Post said: “As with all information we receive, we consider the authenticity of the material, any motives of the source and assess the public interest when making decisions about what, if anything, to publish.”

Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for Politico, said the 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 contained in those documents.”

Indeed, it wasn’t long after Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate to several news organizations digging up unflattering statements that the senator from Ohio had made about him.

It’s also easy to recall how in 2016, candidate Trump and his team encouraged reporting on Clinton campaign documents that Wikileaks obtained 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 excellent risotto.

Brian Fallon, then Clinton campaign spokesman, noted at the time how striking it was that concern about Russian hacking quickly gave way to fascination with what was revealed. “Just like Russia wanted,” he said.

Unlike this year, the Wikileaks material was dumped into the public domain, increasing pressure on news organizations to publish. That led to some bad decisions: In some cases, the media misrepresented some of the material to be more damaging to Clinton than it actually was, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote “Cyberwar.” wrote a book about the events of 2016. hacking.

This year, Jamieson said she believed news organizations made the right decision not to publish the details of Trump campaign material because they cannot be sure of the source.

“How do you know you’re not being manipulated by the Trump campaign?” Jamieson said. She is conservative when it comes to publishing decisions “because we are in the age of disinformation,” she said.

Thomas Rid, director of the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at Johns Hopkins, also believes the news organizations made the right decision, but for different reasons. He said it appeared that an attempt by a foreign agent to influence the 2024 presidential campaign was more newsworthy than the leaked material itself.

But one prominent journalist, Jesse Eisinger, a senior reporter and editor at ProPublica, suggested that the media could have said more than they did. While it is true that Vance’s previous statements about Trump are easy to find publicly, the vetting document could have pointed out which statements were most pertinent to the campaign, or revealed things the journalists did not know.

Once the material is determined to be accurate, newsworthiness is a more important consideration than the source, he said.

“I don’t think they handled it well,” Eisinger said. “I think they learned the lesson of 2016 too much.”